I finally got Aerofoil working on linux by digging around in the git shit. The locally-run version with the usable level editor and the theoretical possibility of importing houses.
There are also no official instructions on how to do this correctly in the places you would expect official instructions to be so I guess this is a tutorial now.
download the full source code from the main repository. Do not download the stable releases - there were changes that fix the linux version after the last stable release.
MOSTLY, you want to follow the instructions in the LINUX.txt file in Aerofoil-master, however IT LIES.
Firstly, you must edit the file CMakeFiles/AerofoilX.dir/link.txt to output the executable at a path that isn't already a directory. Specifically you must change the AerofoilX near the end of the file after the -o to some other name. There is even a mention of this problem in the thread discussing the fixes but it's such an easy change I don't understand why they didn't just apply it at the same time. If you do not do this, the game will fail to compile.
If you make install, I was unable to find an executable produced anywhere (it did copy some source files to system folders though) but maybe I am fucking stupid. If you just make you will end up with a functional executable in the same location as the sources.
You DO need to grab the Packaged directory from the windows version of Aerofoil. Why it is not included with the source still perplexes our top scientists. However, you need to put it in the same directory as the Aerofoil executable, NOT (parent)/lib/aerofoil like the LINUX.txt states (at least if you make the executable in place).
User houses end up at ~/.local/share/aerofoil/aerofoil/Houses. Aerofoil has zip-formatted houses so you can stick custom graphics and stuff in there with any modern archive tool.
Alex Diener's big archive of old houses has most of them in the obsolete .sit format, which unhappily I have not found a way to convert on Linux. Perhaps I should pester him about this, as he is the Known Glider Archive Guy and there exists a windows tool for the conversion. (Given how poorly trying to run the pre-compiled binaries of Aerofoil through wine went I have not bothered attempting this myself.)
