FlightGear takes off
FlightGear is a multiplatform, GPLed flight simulator. It is sophisticated, realistic, and extensible. You can choose to fly more than 100 different aircraft, ranging from a Sopwith Camel to a UFO, you can take off and land from thousands of airports, and you can fly over virtually any terrain in the world. After 10 years of development, it has suddenly become a very hot item. How hot? You may have seen it used recently on prime time TV and not realized it. It was used in an episode of Fox TV's legal drama Justice to prove pilot error in the fatal crash of a private plane.
Getting started with FlightGear
For most of us, the best way to install FlightGear is to use the version included in our distribution of choice. In Ubuntu Edgy, that's 0.9.10-2, and that's what I have used while writing this article. You can also grab a tarball, or check out the latest from CVS, and build it from scratch, but beware, it may require a serious effort to build.
Before you bother installing FlightGear, however, make sure your system meets the minimum hardware requirements. The bottom line is that you need 3D acceleration. For Linux users, the best bet seems to be an Nvidia card with 3D enabled. I've heard tales of woe on the IRC channel from those trying to run FlightGear on Linux with ATI cards.
Once installed, you'll have a FlightGear root directory somewhere on your system.
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