FlightGear is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License. FlightGear runs on many different platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS-X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX.
The goal of the FlightGear project
is to create a sophisticated
flight simulator framework for use in research or academic
environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting
flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are
developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be
expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.
FlightGear Live is a
bootable live system on CD (or any bootable medium) that boots into
Linux, with FlightGear setup,
ready to run. Current version of FlightGear
Live is created using the
Morphix framework.
In theory FlightGear Live
will boot and run on any Intel x86-based (including Intel Pentium and
AMD) systems. However to have everything working properly and smoothly,
it is recommended that you have at least 512Mb of RAM. FlightGear uses OpenGL for its 3D
graphics, so you also need a
display card that has 3D hardware acceleration support under Linux and
X,
such as NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel's graphics display cards.
FlightGear should work well
with any display card that has 3D hardware acceleration support under
Linux and X. So far FlightGear Live
has been tested mainly with NVIDIA and ATI display cards. Both
NVIDIA and ATI proprietary display driver, as well as the ATI open
source driver for Linux are included. Other
common display such as the Intel integrated graphics chipset should
also work.
When FlightGear Live
starts up, it will try its best to setup and choose the right display
driver for X with 3D hardware acceleration. If you wish to change the
display driver, simply exit out of X and follow the instructions.
If an NVIDIA display card is detected, the NVIDIA proprietary driver
will be used by default. If you have any trouble please make sure you
tried all the
versions of the driver included (For example, some older NVIDIA cards
seem to work better with older drivers). And if this still does not
solve the
problem, please tell us about it. You
can find out more about NVIDIA proprietary driver here.
If an ATI display card is detected, it will try to determine whether it
should use the ATI proprietary driver, or the Open Source ATI Radeon
driver. Please note that at the moment if you have a display card that
is supported by both drivers, it will use the ATI proprietary driver.
The ATI
proprietary driver currently supports Radeon 8500 and later AGP
or PCI Express cards, as well as FireGL 8700 and later products. You
can find out more about ATI
proprietary driver here. The
Open Source ATI Radeon driver has 3D support for cards below the R300
series. To find out more, please read radeon(4x) man
page, or click here.
If you have a display card that works with 3D hardware acceleration on
your system, but does not work under FlightGear
Live, please tell us about it.
The current base system of FlightGear
Live is Debian Etch Testing (i.e. before Etch was released as
stable).
You can install anything on top
of the live system using apt-get.
Here is a list of some of the goodies included with the this FlightGear Live LinuxTag 2007
edition:
You can get more aircraft at the aircraft
download page. With the current FlightGear
Live, you can install new aircraft by extracting them to /opt/flightgear/data/Aircraft/
You can get more sceneries at the scenery
download page (currently version 0.9.10). With the current FlightGear Live, you can install new
sceneries by extracting them to /opt/flightgear/sceneries/downloads/
FlightGear Live is still in
its very early stage of development. If you have found problems in any
aspects, including problems with FlightGear
itself, please let us know, with as
much details as possible. There are tools such as strace, gdb and valgrind included to help you to
help us solving your problems.
When X (the GUI) is up and running, you are user fglive. You can become root in a
terminal by using sudo (for
example, to get a root shell, run "sudo
-s"). No password is required. At the text console (for example
if you quit X, or if your X does not start properly) you are root already.
/etc/init.d/networking
restart" or "ifdown" and "ifup".For any FlightGear Live
specific issues or feedbacks, please contact Pigeon directly via e-mail
or
on FlightGear's IRC.
For any FlightGear issues, you
may:
If you are not sure whether it is a FlightGear
Live issue or a FlightGear
issue, please make it a FlightGear
Live issue to start with ;)