I just discovered that apparently automatic update is broken in X-Plane 10.30 beta 5.*  If you are participating in the X-Plane 1030 beta program, then when you receive an automatic notification of a newer beta, then installing the beta will fail with an error number 2 or 3 (depending on what OS you are on).

Update: many users are not affected by this problem.  The reason: older auto-updates leave the installer in the right place, so this bug only hits you if you haven’t done a recent, functional auto-update, e.g. from beta 1 to beta 2.  Since my X-System folder was relatively clean (due to my recent C drive face-plant) this bug did hit me.

If you see this bug, here is how you can work around this.

  1. Launch X-Plane.  When X-Plane tells you there is a new beta, click “Get Beta”.
  2. When the installer downloads, click “Update”.
  3. When you hit the error message, click “ok”.
  4. When X-Plane finishes launching, quit.
  5. Go to your Output/preferences folder and locate the installer.  It will have a name “X-Plane 10 Installer.app” on Mac, “X-Plane 10 Installer Windows.exe” on Windows, and “X-Plane 10 Installer Linux” on Linux.
  6. Move the installer out of Output/preferences directly into your X-Plane folder, so that it is next to the X-Plane application.
  7. Re-launch X-Plane.  When X-Plane tells you there is a new beta, click “Get Beta”.
  8. At this point, auto-update will work normally.

A few notes on beta 6 coming shortly…

* There are two things that are particularly annoying about this kind of bug: first, you can’t just get an auto-update to get the bug fix, because auto-update itself is broken, and second, because we didn’t find out that auto-update was broken until shipping beta 6, the bug is still in beta 6, so it’ll take another update to fix it.  However, you will only need to use this ‘fix-it’ procedure once.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

8 comments on “How To Update X-Plane 10.30 Beta 5 to X-Plane 10.30 Beta 6

    1. Updated to reflect that – yeah – you put the installer next to the application, whose name is platform specific. The bug is that the Sim DL’s the installer to the wrong location.

  1. And just for the record, no beta b6 update issues with Win7 64 bit without the movement of file requirement. No error 2 or 3 at all.

    1. Post updated. Basically if you’ve run the auto-update in the past and left the DL’d installer in place, you won’t see the bug. So this hits fewer people than I expected, which is good.

Comments are closed.