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Improved FlightGear & friends support with openSUSE

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Improved FlightGear & friends support with openSUSE

Postby ThorstenB » Thu Jan 26, 2012 7:12 pm

Hi,

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)
And the FlightGear launcher applications / GUI-front ends:
  • fgrun
  • FGx
More utilities may be added, if someone is able to provide the necessary build script to pack the RPM.

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
Last edited by ThorstenB on Sun Jan 29, 2012 11:17 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Improved FlightGear & friends support with openSUSE

Postby sgofferj » Thu Jan 26, 2012 8:35 pm

I'm using Thorsten's repos already for a while and it's really painless and simply works. Really great job!
Now we just need some insane guy who can create a RPM build script for TerraGear Image...

Besides: @Thorsten: Are there plans to use OSBS to build the binaries for the other major distros too? Seem not too far fetched a thought...
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Re: Improved FlightGear & friends support with openSUSE

Postby ThorstenB » Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:10 pm

Yes, TerraGear would be another candidate for the repo. However, I'm not using it myself and haven't even tried to compile it locally. So, I'm hoping for some volunteer :).

Right, the OBS (openSUSE build service) can also produce RPMs for other distros. However, it requires a lot more work to get the dependencies and installation details for all the distros right. And it needs a lot more testing. Also, the cross-distro building feature of OBS hasn't really used a lot so far. I won't be able to work on this myself - and we'd probably need several people to get this done. But again, if anyone else was interested and extended the RPM spec's accordingly, I'd be happy to add this...
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Re: Improved FlightGear & friends support with openSUSE

Postby JC_SV » Tue Feb 07, 2012 2:09 am

ThorstenB: I really wanted to say thanks for your effort.
Last weekend I installed de latest development version of Flightgear without seeing any problem using your repositories. It takes a LOT of time to download and install a Git Version in ubuntu using the script for compilation with a slow internet conection. But with OpenSuse and your repos it was easy and didn't take so much time.
I am new to opensuse and I am just starting to get used to it. At least I am not afraid of RPM packages because one of the first dristo I used was Mandriva. Opensuse is easier with flightgear so I might be leaving Ubuntu behind ( I haven't erase my Ubuntu partition yet). I encourage any linux-flightgear user to try OpenSuse and this repos.

Thank you

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