Appendix A
Missed approach: If anything refuses to work

In the following section, we tried to sort some problems according to operating system, but if you encounter a problem, it may be a wise idea to look beyond ”your” operating system - just in case. If you are experiencing problems, we would strongly advise you to first check the FAQ maintained by Cameron Moore at

http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/FlightGear-FAQ.html.

Moreover, the source code contains a directory docs-mini containing numerous ideas on and solutions to special problems. This is also a good place to go for further reading.

A.1 FlightGear Problem Reports

The best place to look for help is generally the mailing lists, specifically the [Flightgear-User] mailing list. If you happen to be running a CVS version of FlightGear, you may want to subscribe to the [Flightgear-Devel] list. Instructions for subscription can be found at

http://www.flightgear.org/mail.html.

It’s often the case that someone has already dealt with the issue you’re dealing with, so it may be worth your time to search the mailing list archives at

http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-users%40flightgear.org/

http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel%40flightgear.org/.

There are numerous developers and users reading the lists, so questions are generally answered. However, messages of the type

FlightGear does not compile on my system. What shall I do?

are hard to answer without any further detail given, aren’t they? Here are some things to consider including in your message when you report a problem:

• Operating system: (Linux Redhat 7.0. . . /Windows 98SE. . . )
• Computer: (Pentium III, 1GHz. . . )
• Graphics board/chip: (Diamond Viper 770/NVIDIA RIVA TNT2. . . )
• Compiler/version: (Cygnus version 1.0. . . )
• Versions of relevant libraries: (PLIB 1.2.0, Mesa 3.0. . . )
• Type of problem: (Linker dies with message. . . )
• Steps to recreate the problem: Start at KSFO, turn off brakes . . .

For getting a trace of the output which FlightGear produces, then following command may come in handy (may need to be modified on some OSs or may not work on others at all, though):

%FG  ROOT/BIN/fgfs >log.txt 2>&1

One final remark: Please avoid posting binaries to these lists! List subscribers are widely distributed, and some users have low bandwidth and/or metered connections. Large messages may be rejected by the mailing list administrator. Thanks.

A.2 General problems

• FlightGear runs SOOO slow.
  If FlightGear says it’s running with something like 1 fps (frame per second) or below you typically don’t have working hardware OpenGL support. There may be several reasons for this. First, there may be no OpenGL hardware drivers available for older cards. In this case it is highly recommended to get a new board.

  Second, check if your drivers are properly installed. Several cards need additional OpenGL support drivers besides the ”native” windows ones. For more detail check Appendix B.

• Either configure or make dies with not found PLIB headers or libraries.
  Make sure you have the latest version of PLIB (> version 1.2) compiled and installed. Its headers like pu.h have to be under /usr/include/plib and its libraries, like libplibpu.a should be under /lib. Double check there are no stray PLIB headers/libraries sitting elsewhere!

  Besides check careful the error messages of configure. In several cases it says what is missing.

A.3 Potential problems under Linux

Since we don’t have access to all possible flavors of Linux distributions, here are some thoughts on possible causes of problems. (This Section includes contributions by Kai Troester.)

• Wrong library versions
  This is a rather common cause of grief especially when you prefer to install the libraries needed by FlightGear by hand. Be sure that especially the Mesa library contains support for the 3DFX board and that GLIDE libraries are installed and can be found. If a ldd `which fgfs` complains about missing libraries you are in trouble.

  You should also be sure to always keep the latest version of PLIB on your system. Lots of people have failed miserably to compile FlightGear just because of an outdated plib.

• Missing permissions
  In case you are using XFree86 before release 4.0 the FlightGear binary may need to be setuid root in order to be capable of accessing some accelerator boards (or a special kernel module as described earlier in this document) based on 3DFX chips. So you can either issue a

  chown root.root /usr/local/bin/fgfs ;
  chmod 4755 /usr/local/bin/fgfs

  to give the FlightGear binary the proper rights or install the 3DFX module. The latter is the ”clean” solution and strongly recommended!

• Non-default install options
  FlightGear will display a lot of diagnostics while starting up. If it complains about bad looking or missing files, check that you installed them in the way they are supposed to be installed (i.e. with the latest version and in the proper location). The canonical location FlightGear wants its data files under /usr/local/lib. Be sure to grab the latest versions of everything that might be needed!
• Compile problems in general
  Make sure you have the latest (official) version of gcc. Old versions of gcc are a frequent source of trouble! On the other hand, some versions of the RedHat 7.0 reportedly have certain problems compiling FlightGear as they include a preliminary version of GCC.
• Problems with linking
  There may be several reasons; however in case you get a message like

  libmk4.so.0: cannot open shared object file

  the reason is a missing library package called Metakit. This is provided with SimGear in packed form. On its installation, see Sec. 2.3.2.

A.4 Potential problems under Windows

• The executable refuses to run.
  You may have tried to start the executable directly either by double-clicking fgfs.exe in Windows Explorer or by invoking it within a MS-DOS shell. Double-clicking via Explorer does never work (unless you set the environment variable FG_ROOT in autoexec.bat or otherwise). Rather double-click runfgfs.bat. For more details, check Chapter 4.

  Another cause of grief might be that you did not download the most recent versions of the base package files required by FlightGear, or you did not download any of them at all. Have a close look at this, as the scenery/texture format is still under development and may change frequently. For more details, check Chapter 3.

  Next, if you run into trouble at runtime, do not use windows utilities for unpacking the .tar.gz. If you did, try it in the Cygnus shell with tar xvfz instead.

• FlightGear ignores the command line parameters.
  There is a problem with passing command line options containing a ”=” to windows batch files. Instead, include the options into runfgfs.bat.
• I am unable to build FlightGear under MSVC/MS DevStudio.
  By default, FlightGear is build with GNU GCC. The Win32 port of GNU GCC is known as Cygwin. For hints on Makefiles required for MSVC for MSC DevStudio have a look into

  ftp://www.flightgear.org/pub/flightgear/Source/.

  In principle, it should be possible to compile FlightGear with the project files provided with the source code.

• Compilation of FlightGear dies.
  There may be several reasons for this, including true bugs. However, before trying to do anything else or report a problem, make sure you have the latest version of the Cygwin compiler, as described in Section 2. In case of doubt, start setup.exe anew and download and install the most recent versions of bundles as they possibly may have changed.