Linux Troubleshooting

This page will document various issues that may come up while running the Linux version of X-Plane. If you have not yet managed to install X-Plane, please see the Linux installation page.

General troubleshooting
If you are having issues with X-Plane, please check the "specific issues" section to see if your issue is listed. If it is not, then you may wish to try (in no particular order):
 * ...upgrading to the latest version of X-Plane. If you need assistance doing so, please see the Linux installation page.
 * ...checking your OpenGL drivers. In particular, make sure that you have the latest version from your graphics card manufacturer; for ATI cards, check [|ATI's site], and for nVidia cards, check [|nVidia's site].
 * ...verifying that you meet the minimum system requirements for X-Plane. Please see [|the appropriate page on X-Plane.com] to make sure.
 * ...removing any plugins that you may have added. If you haven't added any plugins, then you can skip this step.

X-Plane crashes immediately with a "glibc detected..." error
Some users with ATI graphics cards have reported that X-Plane crashes immediately on startup, even if installation went smoothly, with the following error (or one like it):
 * glibc detected *** ./X-Plane-i586: free: invalid pointer: 0x0e3769d0 ***

This is a known interaction with the ATI drivers and X-Plane. If you see this on an nVidia system, please send X-Plane Linux tech support an e-mail. This crash is usually avoidable using the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable. To set this, start X-Plane from the command line as such: $ cd "/home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60" $ MALLOC_CHECK_=1 ./X-Plane-i586

Obviously, these directions assume that you have installed X-Plane in /home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60, and that you're using the i586 binaries. If your name is not Joshua, then you may have to change the path to wherever you installed X-Plane. Of special note is that MALLOC_CHECK_=1 must be on the same line as the X-Plane command; placing them on two separate lines will cause the shell to not export the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable to X-Plane and therefore cause this workaround to be ineffective.

If you would like a quick way to do this each time you start X-Plane, you may wish to make a shell script to start X-Plane.

X-Plane cannot find ATC chatter files
For some users, when X-Plane is launched from a file manager by double-clicking on the icon, X-Plane may not start properly, instead popping up an error like: BE ADVISED. Cound not find ATC chatter files! I am searching Resources/sounds/radio chatter/ (init_gen.cpp line 15) X-Plane may pop up this error message even if the files are intact and in that folder.

X-Plane tries to autodetect which folder it has been installed in, and sometimes is not successful in doing this. You can help X-Plane along by starting X-Plane from the command line inside the directory that you installed it in. To do this, start X-Plane from the command line, as such: $ cd "/home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60" $ ./X-Plane-i586

Obviously, these directions assume that you have installed X-Plane in /home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60, and that you're using the i586 binaries. If your name is not Joshua, then you may have to change the path to wherever you installed X-Plane.

If you would like a quick way to do this each time you start X-Plane, you may wish to make a shell script to start X-Plane.

X-Plane exits with the message "undefined symbol: alutInit"
X-Plane is compiled against an older version of OpenAL to maximize compatibility with all distributions of Linux. For some users running versions of X-Plane before 8.60, X-Plane will not automatically find the libalut library containing the alutInit symbol that it needs, and will produce an error such as: ./X-Plane-i586: symbol lookup error: ./X-Plane-i586: undefined symbol: alutInit

This error should be resolved in X-Plane 8.60; please update to the latest version of X-Plane.

If, for some reason, you cannot upgrade to X-Plane 8.60, you can force X-Plane to load the library with the symbol by setting the LD_PRELOAD environment variable. To do this, start X-Plane from the command line, as such: $ cd "/home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60" $ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libalut.so.0 ./X-Plane-i586

Obviously, these directions assume that you have installed X-Plane in /home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60, and that you're using the i586 binaries. If your name is not Joshua, then you may have to change the path to wherever you installed X-Plane. Of special note is that LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libalut.so.0 must be on the same line as the X-Plane command; placing them on two separate lines will cause the shell to not export the LD_PRELOAD environment variable to X-Plane and therefore cause this workaround to be ineffective. This may not work if you are on a 64-bit system; instead, you may have to replace "/usr/lib" with "/usr/lib32" to point X-Plane at the 32-bit version of the library.

If you would like a quick way to do this each time you start X-Plane, you may wish to make a shell script to start X-Plane.

Be advised, however, that older versions of X-Plane are unsupported; we strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest.

X-Plane exits after popping up a dialog saying "Could not get our host!"
When X-Plane starts up, it tries to find the IP address of the local machine by running the resolver on the machine's hostname. On most machines, the machine's hostname resolves to 127.0.0.1 (or something within the 127.0.0.0/8 netblock), as defined in /etc/hosts, but some distributions do not add this alias properly.

If you get this message, it's usually indicative of this being the case. To fix this, you'll need to edit your /etc/hosts to add a line like that. On my machine, which is named "rebirth" (i.e., when I run "hostname" at the command line, it prints the string "rebirth"), then I have a line in /etc/hosts that says: 127.0.1.1    rebirth

If you have difficulty editing /etc/hosts by hand, you may run the following command at a root shell, and it will add the appropriate line automatically. Make sure to copy and paste the command exactly; the shell is picky about what it accepts. (echo; echo 127.0.0.1 $(hostname)) >> /etc/hosts

X-Plane (or any of the X-apps) abruptly exit. On the terminal, the message "Killed" appears.
This is usually an indication that your system has run out of memory and swap. When the Linux kernel runs out of virtual memory, it chooses a process to kill -- usually, it chooses the process that is using the most memory on the system. X-Plane uses a lot of memory, and when the system runs out, X-Plane gets killed.

We recommend that you run X-Plane with at least 1GB of memory, although I have gotten it to run with everything turned down on 512MB. Anything below that will make your system swap heavily and will make X-Plane unusably slow. In either case, I recommend at least 1GB of swap enabled on your system, even if you have a lot of memory.

If this message still appears even with what you believe to be a sufficient amount of memory and swap, please e-mail the output of the commands "free" and "cat /proc/meminfo" to X-Plane Linux tech support as described in that page.

X-Plane hangs and spews "fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrAllocMem failed!!"
This message comes from the ATI fglrx drivers, not from X-Plane. ATI is unresponsive in resolving this issue; none of the X-Plane team has managed to maintain any kind of contact with the ATI Linux group in resolving this. You may wish to send ATI a polite e-mail describing the issue. If you have not upgraded to the latest fglrx drivers from ati.com, please do so. If you continue to have this issue, you may wish to send X-Plane Linux tech support an e-mail with the output of the 'glxinfo' command, and perhaps the output of 'lspci'.

At this time, ATI cards in Linux are not recommended. I have had better luck with nVidia cards; if you want a permanent solution to the ATI problems, replace your graphics card with one that is better supported.

If all else fails...
If all else fails, please send X-Plane Linux tech support an e-mail. Be sure to read through that entire page (or at least skim it) so that your e-mail is as helpful as possible.