support for FlightGear has considerably improved for openSUSE Linux: openSUSE now has a dedicated "FlightGear repository" continuously providing ready-to-use binaries of the latest development version ("Git" version) of the FlightGear Flight Simulator and many related utilities. The binaries are regularly updated (not daily, but about weekly for FlightGear and a bit less often for the utilities).
The repository currently provides:
- FlightGear, SimGear, fgdata (the flight simulator core)
- Atlas (displays high quality aeronautical charts)
- FGcom (VoIP-based radio communication in multiplayer mode)
- FGComGui (GUI front-end for fgcom)
- fgms (Multiplayer server, only required for local multiplayer setups)
- TaxiDraw (design utility for airports and AI traffic)
- TerraGearGUI (front-end for the TerraGear scenery rendering toolkit)
- fgrun
- FGx
All tools should be pretty much pre-configured, and can directly be launched from the menu.
To install flightgear, use this link and choose your openSUSE version. You can also add openSUSE's games:FlightGear:Unstable repository manually. After installation, you can select more utiltities from the YaST's software selection.
Remember, the "Unstable" repository always provides the latest development version - so this is not suitable for everyone.
As of today, the repository provides "FlightGear 2.6.0 RC1", so you can help with testing the current release candidate.
After the official 2.6.0 release, FlightGear 2.6.0 and a stable version of all utilities will be available in the openSUSE "games repository", while this "Unstable" project keeps tracking the development versions (you could switch back to "games" after the 2.6.0 release).
I hope this will be helpful to some users. I cannot help with other Linux distros. But maybe we'll find volunteers setting up a similar service for other distros, or at least try to add stable versions of FlightGear and all its friend-utilities to the distros.
cheers,
Thorsten