Reinventing the wheel? Eh, maybe ... but in all fairness, no 'casual' user will want to compile anything or pass along a ton of command line arguments, and I didn't find FGo until I came here to post this, lol. Plus, isn't that what Linux is about ... choices? =o)
So, in a bout of boredom and frustration, I spent the past couple days making this:
FG Flier: https://sourceforge.net/projects/fgflier/
From the README:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This program was designed on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with Python 2.6.5 and
wxPython 2.8. If you're using this program, you're probably
on Linux, and thus already have python. BUT, you will have
to have the wxWidgets toolkit installed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I never could get FGRun to compile correctly from the source. And although
the 'download_and_compile.sh' would compile FGRun right, it wouldn't
download or compile FlightGear correctly, and I kept ending up with
various errors.
Now, I could have spend some time on forums (although none of the responses
to the issues I searched for worked for me), trying to figure out what
the issue is and how to resolve it ... but then I thought: Why?
You shouldn't have to compile anything from another source to run a game. It
shouldn't be that complicated. Also I found the FlightGear launcher
tools to either be overly-complicated, or lacking in some area. So,
I decided to make something that is (in my opinion) as simple as possible.
I have included far more options than I ever use, but seem to be (again,
in my opinion) enough to cover any casual user's needs.
The default setup for this program assumes you have installed FlightGear from
the repositories (either Ubuntu or PlayDeb). It was designed for, and
tested on, FlightGear v2.0, however it *may* work with earlier versions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep up on any bug fixes or feature requests, as it works just the way I want it to, but if I get enough support/suggestions I may stay on top of things. I just thought I'd throw it up on Sourceforge and let everyone give it a shot.