Chapter 2
Preflight: Installing FlightGear

To run FlightGear you need to install the binaries. Once you’ve done this you may install additional scenery and aircraft if you wish.

Pre-compiled binaries for the latest release are available for

• Windows - any flavor,
• Mac OS X,
• Linux.

To download them go to

http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/binary.shtml

and follow the instructions provided on the page.

2.1 Installing scenery

Detailed FlightGear scenery is available for the entire world, allowing you to fly everywhere from the Himalaya mountains to rural Kansas. The FlightGear base package contains scenery for a small area around San Francisco, so to fly elsewhere you will need to download additional scenery.

Each piece of scenery is packaged into a compressed archive, or tarball, in a 10 degree by 10 degree chunk. Each tarball is named after the 10x10 degree chunk it represents, for example w130n50.tgz.

You can download scenery from a clickable map here:

http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/scenery.html

Alternatively, you can support the FlightGear project by purchasing a complete set of scenery for the entire world from here:

http://www.flightgear.org/cdrom/

Once you have downloaded the tarball onto your computer, you need to find the Scenery directory of your FlightGear installation.

• For Windows, this directory is likely to be

  c:\Program Files\FlightGear\data\Scenery.

• For Unices, it is usually

  /usr/local/share/FlightGear/data/Scenery.

• For Mac OS X, it is usually either

  /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/Scenery.

To install the scenery, uncompress the tarball into the Scenery directory. Most operating system provide tools to uncompress tarballs. If you cannot uncompress the tarball, install an extractor program such as 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/).

Note that you should not decompress the numbered scenery files inside the tarball like 958402.gz - this will be done by FlightGear on the fly.

Once you have uncompressed the tarball, the Terrain and Objects directories will contain additional sub-directories with your new scenery inside.

To use the new scenery, simply select a starting airport within the new scenery. If you are using the FlightGear Launcher, you will need to press the Refresh button before you select your airport.

2.1.1 MS Windows Vista/7

If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you may find that Windows installs downloaded scenery (and aircraft) to your Virtual Store:

c:\Users\(Your Name)\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\FlightGear\Scenery

If it does this, you need to copy the Terrain and Objects directories manually to your real FlightGear Scenery directory as described above.

2.1.2 Mac OS X

You may install the downloaded scenery data and aircraft using the GUI launcher. Pressing Install Add-On data on the Advanced Features ? Others tab opens up the file browser window. Selecting one or more scenery data files will install the scenery data into /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/Scenery. Acceptable formats for the scenery data are one of zip, tar.gz, tgz, tar, and extracted folder. If the installation via the GUI launcher failure for some reason, you still have an alternative way to install the data. Opening the data folder by pressing “Open data folder” on the Others tab will pop up an Finder window for the data folder. Dragging an aircraft folder to data/Aircraft folder (or a scenery folder to data/Scenery folder) under the data folder will get the job done.

2.1.3 FG_SCENERY

If you would prefer to keep your downloaded scenery separate from the core installation, you can do so by setting your FG_SCENERY environment variable.

This is where FlightGear looks for Scenery files. It consists of a list of directories that will be searched in order. The directories are separated by “:” on Unix (including Mac OS X) and “;” on Windows.

For example, on Linux a FG_SCENERY environment variable set to

/home/joebloggs/WorldScenery:/usr/local/share/Flightgear/data/Scenery

searches for scenery in

/home/joebloggs/WorldScenery

first, followed by

/usr/local/share/Flightgear/data/Scenery.

On Windows, a FG_SCENERY environment variable set to c:\Program Files\FlightGear\data\Scenery;c:\data\WorldScenery

searches for scenery in

c:\Program Files\FlightGear\data\Scenery

first, followed by

c:\data\WorldScenery

Setting up environment variables on different platforms is beyond the scope of this document.

2.1.4 Fetch Scenery as you fly

FlightGear comes with a tool TerraSync which allows to fetch the Scenery as you fly, if you have a permanent Internet connection at your disposal. Create an empty ‘working’ directory for TerraSync, writable to the user and point FlightGear at this directory using the FG_SCENERY variable (as explained above). Do not let TerraSync download Scenery into your pre-installed Scenery directory.

TerraSync expects you to feed FlightGear’s current position via the ‘Atlas’ protocol, so call FlightGear with the:

--atlas=socket,out,1,localhost,5505,udp

command line parameter and tell TerraSync about the port number you’re using as well as the respective directory:

terrasync -p 5505 -S -d /usr/local/share/TerraSync

On Mac OS X or Windows, just checking “Download scenery on the fly” on the GUI launcher invokes TerraSync automatically for downloading the Scenery around your aircraft, so you don’t have to specify the atlas option or FG_SCENERY at all.

There is a chicken/egg problem when you first start up in a brand new area. FlightGear is expecting the Scenery to be there now but it may not have been fetched yet. Therefore it’s suggested to exit FlightGear after TerraSync has caught up and finally to restart FlightGear.

Note that TerraSync (when called with the "-S" command line switch, as recommended) is going to download Scenery via the Subversion protocol over HTTP. Thus, if your Internet access is set up to use a HTTP proxy, plase make yourself aware how to configure the "libsvn" Subversion client for use of a proxy. If you are using Mac OS X 10.5, The GUI launcher automatically specifies -S if svn is available.

One major benefit of TerraSync is that it always fetches the latest and greatest Scenery from the FlightGear World (Custom) Scenery Project and therefore allows you to pick up incremental updates independant of the comprehensive World Scenery releases, which are generally synchronized with FlightGear releases.

2.1.5 Creating your own Scenery

If you are interested in generating your own Scenery, have a look at TerraGear - the tools that generate the Scenery for FlightGear:

http://www.terragear.org/

The most actively maintained source tree of the TerraGear toolchain is co-located at the FlightGear landuse data Mapserver:

http://mapserver.flightgear.org/git/gitweb.pl.

2.2 Installing aircraft

The base FlightGear package contains only a small subset of the aircraft that are available for FlightGear. Developers have created a wide range of aircraft, from WWII fighters like the Spitfire, to passenger planes like the Boeing 747.

You can download aircraft from

http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/aircraft/index.shtml

Simply download the file and uncompress it into the data/Aircraft subdirectory of your installation. The aircraft are downloaded as .zip files. Once you have uncompressed them, there will be a new sub-directory in your data/Aircraft directory containing the aircraft. Next time you run FlightGear, the new aircraft will be available.

On Mac OS X, you may use the GUI launcher to install the downloaded aircraft files as described in section 2.1.2.

2.3 Installing documentation

Most of the packages named above include the complete FlightGear documentation including a PDF version of The FlightGear Manual intended for pretty printing using Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, available from

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/

Moreover, if properly installed, the HTML version can be accessed via FlightGear’s help menu entry.

Besides, the source code contains a directory docs-mini containing numerous ideas on and solutions to special problems. This is also a good place for further reading.

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