A simple page for simple help

The main purpose of this webpage is to help people having a fully featured FlightGear installation. It is mainly based on my own experiences I have made while setup this great piece of software on my server as an rsync server and at home for playing with my Saitek X52 Pro joystick.

First of all, you need to download the latest version of FlightGear from a mirror. At the moment of writing this page it was 1.0.0 in main program and scenery. Use this link for instance.

If you have done so you can only fly a bit around in the area of San Francisco. That is indeed not very much. So you need to get some scenery and more "shared models". Also you will see a lot warning messages or failtures. We fix them all step-by-step.

So first let us fix the warnings (a bit, not all) and failtures while the program is starting up. Download SharedModels.tgz and (if you have a dial-in connection) GlobalObjects.tgz from this webpage. You don't need to download every single building! Just grab the big tar balls.

On Linux systems you will find tools like tar and gzip for uncompression and extraction of the data. But wait! You need to know where you shall put them.

The GlobalObjects.tgz archive contains a lot directories like eXXXnYYY plus a lot sub directories with small files in. First change the directory to FG_ROOT (on my Debian system it is /usr/shared/games/FlightGear/ and change again into Scenery/Objects/. The final command will looks like this:

cd /usr/share/games/FlightGear/Scenery/Objects/
wget http://scenemodels.flightgear.org/download/GlobalObjects.tgz
tar xzf GlobalObjects.tgz # (this will take looooong ...)
rm -f GlobalObjects.tgz # (to save disk space)

You can use the tab key for autocompletition if you prefer not to enter all single characters in the cd command.

That part was simple, wasn't it? :)

Now we need to get the SharedModels.tgz file but its content should be stored in a different folder. Here are again the needed commands to get it, extract and fix a small bug in it:

cd ../../
wget http://scenemodels.flightgear.org/download/SharedModels.tgz
tar xzf SharedModels.tgz # (will take again a bit longer)
rm -f SharedModels.tgz # (again for saving disk space)
cd Models/Communications/
ln -s ../Structures/vordme_1.* . # The last dot is required!

The last two lines will fix the missing files which are required by a lot scenery files. This is no longer required because it has already been fixed.

Well done! You can now still fly around in the basic area of San Fransico Beach but with some more objects and details. :) Enjoy it before we continue with the last steps.

If you have a lot (!!!) disk space left you may want to download more scenery on your drive. But you can also save it by using an external rsync server like mine. I have downloaded and extracted the full scenery plus GlobalObjects.tgz.

If you want to use an external rsync server (you need TerraSync to do so) please use my launcher helper which available here. It is written in Bash and starts TerraSync for you to connect to my rsync server. It also helps you with playing in multi-player mode and many more!

If you want to download all the scenery then find a free weekend and continue below this paragraph. Everyone else is done here or might download some aircrafts as well.

Hint for mass-downloaders: You don't need the data from AirportOverlays and RawData if you just want to fly around! You need them if you want to build scenery only. And don't mess around with the Models-Airspace.tar.gz and Scenery-Airspace.tar.gz located here. In the Scenery-Airspace.tar.gz you will find a folder called Objects. Don't mix that with the one in Scenery. If you do so you need to re-install your scenery again.

Continue here with full scenery download: wget can be a good friend if you know how to use it and if you clean up the download after usage. So this next script is based on it.

You can find my download helper here. Here are the needed commands to get full scenery on your drive:

cd /usr/share/games/FlightGear/Scenery/
wget http://flightgear.mxchange.org/pub/download-helper.zip
unzip download-helper.zip
sh extract.sh

Clean up of downloaded archives is being done by extract.sh. If you like you can remove download-helper.zip, extract.sh, listing and okay. They belong to my script and not to FlightGear.

If the download fails just try to restart it with sh extract.sh after some minutes. The both servers are very busy these days... :-/

Happy gaming!

PS: My manually mirrored download archichve for FlightGear can be found here. So take a look around. :)

Created: 2008-03-28 - Last update: 2008-04-23 - Author: Roland Häder
Imprint (needed in Germany) - How to rsync a scenery - My flights in FGFS