Having discovered and installed the pre-packaged Windows FlightGear binary it’s easy to get hooked on what FlightGear has to offer. It quickly becomes obvious that FlightGear is a very active project and that the best way to get the most from the rapid development is to build the latest code. That’s when it’s easy to give up; it’s not easy trawling through the forums for the information needed to build a working version of FlightGear on Win32 systems.

That’s why this guide was created.

Who This Guide Is For

You might find this guide useful if:

· You want to build the latest version of FlightGear

· You want to test the latest version on Win32 and report problems

· You want to contribute to the development by building your own code

· You just want to say “hey, I can build FlightGear!”

Caveats

This guide assumes some, but not much, familiarity with software systems.

This guide does not assume any knowledge about Unix. Phew! Most Win32 users will regard Unix as the most unfriendly operating system ever invented. This isn’t true; it’s not that Unix is unfriendly – it just chooses its friends carefully.

This guide will undoubtedly become out of date. The screen shots were taken in October 2005.

Install Cygwin

This guide is not meant to be a comprehensive Cygwin tutorial. If you’ve never before used Cygwin then this section should offer some useful information. It’s important to recognise that Cygwin, like FlightGear, is an active project and so the version numbers of Cygwin packages may differ to those illustrated here.

This section describes enough of the Cygwin environment to allow you to build both the stable version of FlightGear (version 0.9.8) and the development version of FlightGear (version 0.9-CVS).

To download and install Cygwin go to http://www.cygwin.com then find the “Install Cygwin Now” link and save setup.exe.

Run setup.exe and follow the dialogue boxes.

The following dialogue box will eventually be displayed. Use this dialogue to choose which Cygwin packages to install.

When setup is run for the first time a default set of “base” packages are already selected. To build FlightGear you need an additional set of development packages. Expand the “Devel” node then find the “autoconf” and “automake” packages.

Click on “Skip” next to the “autoconf2.1” package. The version number of autoconf is displayed in the “New” column. A marked checkbox appears in the “Binary” column and a cleared checkbox appears in the “Source” column; you’re selecting to use a pre-compiled binary of autoconf rather than building autoconf from source.

Select the most recent “automake” package and the “cvs” package.

Select the “gcc-core” and “gcc-g++” compiler packages.

Important Note: This guide starts by building and installing the stable version of FlightGear (version 0.9.8). This version does not compile with gcc 3.4.4-4. Instead click on the version number in the Cygwin setup until it displays 3.3.3-3 as shown in the picture.

Select the “make” package. Finally expand the Graphics node and select the “OpenGL” package.

Click Next to begin the download and install process.

Start Cygwin. You can perform a very quick test that the required packages have been installed by using the Unix “which” command. You can also check that the correct version of gcc has been installed. The following screenshot illustrates this.

The remainder of this document uses the following style to represent the Cygwin window. The following commands use “which” to check that the remaining packages are correctly installed.

username@machine ~

$ which tar

username@machine ~

$ which cvs

username@machine ~

$ which make

Download FlightGear And The Dependent Packages

FlightGear cannot be compiled in isolation; it relies on a few other packages. This section describes where to find those packages, which files to download and where t

Contents

Introduction

Who This Guide Is For

Caveats

Install Cygwin

Download FlightGear And The Dependent Packages