Update 2011-08-26: If you are using Ubuntu 11.04 or later, it looks like this is now packaged as a .deb by PlayDeb. This post may still be of interest to those using earlier versions of Ubuntu.
I recently had cause to install FlightGear 2.4.0 on Ubuntu 10.04. It’s not packaged in the form of a deb yet, so I’ve documented the commands I used. No guarantees this’ll work for you, as I haven’t tested them rigorously; and I’m assuming some Linux and command-line knowledge.
- Install some dependencies (this may not be a complete list; it’s simply the set I was missing). If you get warnings below about missing libraries, hunt around for them in the Ubuntu archives.
- Get SimGear 2.4.0, unpack it into a temporary directory, and install it (checkinstall will create a deb for you as a side-effect, and install that so you can uninstall with apt if necessary). I’m using
-j10
on make as I have many CPU cores; you may want to tune this to match your number, although it will only affect the speed of build. - Get the FlightGear 2.4.0 source(at the time of writing, the file with the slightly more recent timestamp) and install it:
- Get the 2.4.0 “Base” package and unpack it to /usr/share/local/flightgear. The tarball contains adata/ directory at the top level; you need to move directories around after unpacking so that theflightgear/directory contains direct subdirectories:
- You’re done! Run
fgfs
to launch Flightgear (there’s no GUI so you’ll have to become familiar with the command-line switches).