Making XFLR5 work

XFLR5 is THE program to do the aerodynamics and flight dynamics calculations with - at least as an open source solution.

Disclaimer: I’m doing everything on Ubuntu 19.04.

While there is a packaged version of XFLR5 in the package sources of Ubuntu & Debian this is REALLY old (Version 6.09.06 see here or here from 2013-12 compared to currently current version 6.47 from 2019-07-07) and had a few bugs bugging me. Three solutions for me to get a newer version:

• Compile from source
  • Didn’t work for me really, as there were always errors, but I did not spend too much time on it trying to solve all problems. There are a few projects on github (or somewhere else), which try to provide working compile scripts, which also did not work for me.

• Windows Version with WINE
  • Works flawlessly on one of my computers, which already had wine on it.
• Compile from source USING Qt Creator
  • XFLR5 uses Qt and is generally made as a Qt Creator project. The following steps worked for me perfectly on the first try:
    • Download XFLR5 form sourceforge.
    • Install Qt Creator from package sources.
    • Open the Qt Creator project file with Qt Creator (xflr5.pro coming with sources)
    • In the project settings in Qt Creator set:
      • Build directory to whatever you like
      • Build configuration to “Release”
      • “Run configuration” to “xflr5-gui”
      • Check “Add build library search path…”
      • Press the play button
      • ???
      • profit.
      • YMMV.