The Jenkins build system creates daily builds of the current development state of the simulator. Running these builds is a great way to help test the code and produce feedback for the development team, to make future official releases even better. You get to experience the latest and greatest features being developed in the simulator, as soon as they are made public. Of course, these builds are un-tested, so you should only use them if you’re happy running pre-release software with the occasional bug or crash!
Windows & Mac installers
The Windows and Mac installers come in two variants – a full version including all the required data files, and a lite version containing only the basic application but no data files. The simplest, but bandwidth intensive, method to get a running build is to use the full versions: (typically a 1Gb download or more)
If you are familiar with version-control systems, in particular the Git tools, you can use the smaller versions, with an up-to-date clone of the fgdata repository. Git is available on Mac by installing the Xcode developer application, or via the homebrew project. On Windows, you can find the latest installer here.
The first time you run the lite versions, the application ask you to select the data folder – you should choose the location of your fgdata files, and FlightGear will verify it’s a matching version than can be used. The location is remembered, so you won’t be asked again; to change the location, hold down the ‘alt’ key while launching FlightGear to wipe the saved settings and choose again.
Basic Git usage
To create the initial copy of the data files, use the following command: (note this will download a large quantity of files, and may take many minutes)
$git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/flightgear/fgdata flightgear-fgdata
To keep the files up to date after the initial clone, simply run the following inside the ‘flightgear-fgdata’ folder:
$git pull
Note it is extremely important that you keep your fgdata repository up to date when using the lite versions, otherwise you may experience unexplained behaviour and broken functionality.
Linux daily builds
For Linux users we recommend using the ‘download & compile’ script available here. Instructions can be found on our wiki.