Contrail

Contrail (opens in a new tab) is an addon shop for both MSFS and Prepar3D. They have their own installer (opens in a new tab) which is their method for installing and managing addons bought from Contrail in MSFS.

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This installer and addons bought from Contrail are only supported on Windows, even though this has been able to run on Linux, there is no guarantee that this will work later down the line. Do not expect support from Contrail or the respective addon developers.

Installation

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Difficulty: Medium

The Contrail installer can be slow when launching as it may get stuck on Installing Dependencies. It does work, you may have to give it a few minutes to launch or to restart it a few times.

Download and Extract the installer

You will have to download Contrail (opens in a new tab) and extract the installer manually as if you try to run the installer, an error message will pop up asking you to re-run the installer as a normal user.

To extract the installer, I would recommend you to use p7zip (opens in a new tab).

Put the installer into an empty directory (unless you are fine with files going everywhere) and run the command:

7z x ./ContrailSetup.exe

You should get a few files, and the most important one is the .nupkg file, as this contains the content to install into your compdata.

Now, extract the nupkg in the same folder with the command (replacing X with the current version):

7z x ./ContrailApp-X.X.X-full.nupkg

Now you should have a directory lib/net45, which is the files you will need to add to your compdata.

Move the files to your compdata

All that is required now is to just have the files in your compdata, which may be optional anyways.

I moved the folder to C:/Contrail

You can do so with the command:

mv ./lib/net45/* PATH/TO/COMPDATA/1250410/pfx/drive_c/Contrail

And now you should be able to run Contrail (C:/Contrail/Contrail.exe) with

protontricks -c "wine C:/Contrail/Contrail.exe" 1250410

Keep in mind that Installing Dependencies may take a while, so you will have to be patient. If it does seem to be stuck after a few minutes, you can try to restart Contrail.

(Optional) Create a Desktop Entry

Creating Desktop Entries (opens in a new tab) used to be necessary, but not anymore. It is only useful if you want this in your Desktop Environment's application launcher.

These files will go into ~/.local/share/applications/, but you can create multiple directories inside it to make it easier to manage your custom Desktop Entries you have manually created. For example on my system, I store them under

~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Contrail/

Now create a Desktop Entry inside there with a text editor of your choice. The name of the file is irrelevant as long as it has the .desktop extension.

Contrail.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Contrail
Exec=protontricks -c "wine C:/Contrail/Contrail.exe" 1250410
Type=Application
Categories=Game;Simulation;

Then make sure to update the database for desktop entries by running this command in the terminal

update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

You should now be able to find Contrail in your Desktop Environment's application launcher.

PMDG GSX