These are the instructions to build AirSim on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Theoratically you can build on other distros and versions as well but we haven't tested it (and mostly likely there are extra steps).
First you will need at least cmake version 3.5. If you are using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, you likely already have it. You can check this by command cmake --version.
If you don't have it then follow these instructions.
Unreal engine requires clang compiler 3.9 or higher. To install it use following commands. For other flavors of Linux and more info, please see http://apt.llvm.org/.
sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget -O - http://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key|sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clang-3.9 clang++-3.9 clang-3.9-doc libclang-common-3.9-dev libclang-3.9-dev libclang1-3.9 libclang1-3.9-dbg libllvm-3.9-ocaml-dev libllvm3.9 libllvm3.9-dbg lldb-3.9 llvm-3.9 llvm-3.9-dev llvm-3.9-doc llvm-3.9-examples llvm-3.9-runtime clang-format-3.9 python-clang-3.9 libfuzzer-3.9-dev
Then set v3.9 as default,
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang clang /usr/bin/clang-3.9 60 --slave /usr/bin/clang++ clang++ /usr/bin/clang++-3.9
Navigate to AirSim/cmake folder and run
bash getlibcxx.sh
Navigate to AirSim folder and type,
bash build.sh
This will create a build_debug folder containing the build output and the cmake generated make files.
To clean the build, just delete the build_debug folder.
Now you are ready to follow these instructions to get Unreal working on Linux but note that everywhere you see Clang3.5 in the Unreal documentation replace that with clang3.9.
You can also compile from BashOnWindows
but make sure you are not using a Visual Studio Command Prompt because we don't want cmake to accidentally find VC++ and try and use that!