flightgear/README.Linux

I.  GENERAL LINUX INSTRUCTIONS
==============================

This is a short description of the things that need to be done to get
FlightGear up and running under Linux.

1. Prerequisites:

You need to understand the concepts of 3D acceleration under Linux and
the needed libraries. An excellent source of information is the "Linux
Quake-HOWTO" which can be found at

       http://www.linuxquake.com

If anything seem to be wrong with your 3D setup, check there first!

You need Linux of course (any flavour) and a 3DFX-card (Voodoo1 in my
case).  3D rendering without hardware support can force even the
fastest PII to its knees.  To make use of the accelerator board you
need"

- the GLIDE library installed. Grab it at:

	http://www.3dfx.com/software/download_glidel.html

  and install. There is even an install script contained that will do
  things for you. The canonical place for GLIDE is /usr/local/glide,
  if you prefer another location, you'll have to edit the Makefile for
  FlightGear by hand. Be sure to read and understand the file
  /usr/local/glide/README.

- the MESA library version 3.0 (or greater) installed.

  Grab it at:

			http://www.mesa3d.org/

  unpack it and run "make linux-glide" in the Mesa directory. Follow
  the instructions in the README file, take a close look at
  README.3DFX and play with the demo programs. Relax, rejoice :-)

- the GLUT library version 3.7 (or greater, aka GameGLUT) installed.

  Grab it at:

	http://reality.sgi.com/opengl/glut3/glut3.html

  Note: glut-3.7 is included with Mesa 3.0 so if you've already
  grabbed the latest version of mesa, you should have everything you
  need.

  Alternatively, you can use the 3D-stuff that came along with your
  Linux distribution. At least RedHat (5.3 and later) and S.u.S.E. 6.0
  (or later) contain all the things you need.

  - (optional) the 3DFX kernel module.

  Without this thingy installed, access to your accelerator board
  needs to be SUID root, which bad practice (and a _huge_ security
  hole). Get the 3DFX module from
	
	http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/3dfx/index.html

  and install it:

 	mkdir 3dfx
	cd 3dfx
	tar xvfz ../Dev3Dfx-2.7.tar.gz 
	make
	cp 3dfx.o /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc
	mknod /dev/3dfx c 107 0
	insmod 3dfx

  alternatively, you can get the RPM from there ind use rpm for
  installation.

  - Steve Baker's plib library.

  get it from    

	http://www.woodsoup.org/projs/plib/ 

  and follow the instructions in README.plib.

  - (optional) the gpc libraries.

  Read the README.gpc files to understand what they are good for
  and decide whether you need to download them. If you don't want to
  build your own sceneries, you might not need them.

2. Build FlightGear:

You will need the following files:

	FlightGear-x.xx.tar.gz (source code)

which can be found under 

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

and the support files located at

	     ftp://ftp.flightgear.org/pub/fgfs/Binaries/

the file is called 

	fgfs-base-x.xx.tar.gz       (data files)

Ok, now that you got all the stuff, let's proceed towards installation.

Unpack FlightGear-x.xx.tar.gz using :

	tar xvfz FlightGear-x.xx.tar.gz

and cd info FlightGear-x.xx. Run:

	./configure

and wait a few minutes. configure knows about a lot of options. Have a
look at the file INSTALL in the FlightGear source directory to learn
about them. If run without options, configure assumes that you will
install the data files under /usr/local/lib/FlightGear. Assuming
configure finished successfully, simply run

	make

and wait for the make process to finish. Now become root (for example
by using the su command) and type

	make install

This will install the binaries in /usr/local/bin. Notice that the name
of the FlightGear binary is "fgfs".

Another problem with Linux/Glide is permission-related. All programs
accessing the Accelerator board need root permissions (or the kernel
module mentioned above installed). I _strongly_ recommend the latter.


3. Install the data files

Change to /usr/local/lib

	tar xvfz WHERE_YOU_DOWNLOADED_THE_FILES/fgfs-base-x.xx.tar.gz 

That's it...

4. Fly!

If everything went ok, simply type

	runfgfs

at the prompt. You should see the FlightGear splash-screen and a few
seconds later you'll find youself somewhere in the desert, ready for
take-off.

5. Strange things happen...

A note on the behaviour of Voodoo boards:

Your card comes packaged with a loop-through-cable. If you have only
one monitor, then the Voodoo will take it over when used. This means
that all the applications on your desktop will continue running but
you'll only see the FlightGear screen. If your window manager uses a
focus-follows-mouse policy, don't move the mouse. If you lose the
focus, there's no way to shut down FlightGear graciously! Better
solution: Use two monitors, one for your desktop, connect the other
one to your accelerator. You'll then get a window on your desktop
which manages all keyboard events and you're still able to see your
desktop.

A final note: There are several types of VooDoo cards out there, so be
sure to get the correct version of Glide!

Enjoy!

6. Conclusion

I hope this document provides some help. If it does, send virtual/real
beer to me, if not flame me!

Bernhard H. Buckel
<buckel@wmad95.mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de>


II.  RedHat Linux Notes
=======================

Summary: There are known problems with the versions of libstdc++ that
ships with both RedHat-5.1 and RedHat-5.2.  You need to upgrade your
libstdc++ before attempting to build flight gear on a RedHat system.

Raymond de Vries <vries@per.nl> writes: I ran into [this] problem on
my RedHat 5.2 system (brand new). After some searching I found out
that it's got to do with a 'bug' in the stdlibc++ libraries. I picked
up libstdc++-2.9.0-2.i386.rpm, installed it and FGFS compiled just
fine. However, some other packages must have the libstdc++-2.8
libraries....

BTW I also solved it with the 2.8 libraries by including
/usr/include/g++/std/bastring.cc into the example programs. I believe
this can be done since it's a template, correct me if I'm wrong.


III.  Linux/AXP Notes
====================

As of 2/19/99 I'm not aware of any glide port to Linux/AXP so it's
software rendering only for now.  :-(

This following information is contributed by "Daniel J. Frasnelli"
<dfrasnel@csee.wvu.edu>

1) Mesa was not built correctly by default.  I had to add the "-mieee"
flag to the Make-config for Mesa-3.1beta1 to fix the problem.  After
building and installation, all of the problems I had previously with
GL programs under AlphaLinux disappeared.

2) I also had to set the '-mieee' flag in $CFLAGS before configuring
and building FGFS.  The -mieee switch fixes floating point exception
handling.

I heavily optimized both Mesa and FGFS, using the libffm "fast math
library for Alpha" in preference over the default libm, sticking all
sorts of strange flags in $CFLAGS, etc.  These flags should be
adjusted for your specific architecture:

    export CFLAGS="-mieee -mcpu=ev56 -Wa,-m21164a -pipe -g"
    export CXXFLAGS="-mieee -mcpu=ev56 -Wa,-m21164a -pipe -g"
    ./configure