Ok – I was thinking I might have been a bit too dismissive of flightgear. So, I took a second look (and a third and fourth.) In fact, I found a source rpm of the 0.99 version and rebuilt it for Mandriva 2006 and installed. And went in search of scenery for the local area. Now, to compare the two, X-Plane has more spit and polish and frankly the visuals (from the limited area I could see) are better. Flightgear is interesting from the standpoint that it’s open source (GPL) and can use a variety of flight models.
Category: Linux
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X-Plane flight Simulator for Linux
I remember back when I was running Windows as my primary OS, one of my favorite diversions was Microsoft Flight Simulator (2000?) In fact, I clearly remember circumnavigating the globe in a Cessna in that program (landing at a small strip in Icelend, the old Hong Kong International airport and some airstrip in the Himalayas were the most challenging. In fact, for the altitude problems I didn’t think I’d make it past the himalayas…) Anyway, when I moved to linux it wouldn’t run under wine and there wasn’t much out there to compare that ran under linux.
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Exporting an active linux desktop with vnc, or vnc remote desktop under linux
There are lots of ways to get a remote desktop under linux, remote X, nxserver, vnc. One of the problems though is the most common configuration doesn’t let you connect to a running desktop session. There is a vnc component that let’s you do this and I’m using it right now. On the home network, sometimes I don’t want to be sitting at the desktop machine and would rather use the laptop while checking in on programs running on the desktop itself. But, being too lazy to go to the desktop it would be nice if there was a way I could run something remotely that would let me view that desktop… ahhh there is a way.
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Qemu v. 0.8.0
I just happened across The Qemu site and found that qemu v. 0.8.0 has been released *(yesterday). I haven’t had a chance to download and try myself, but it looks like the open source virtualization software has had quite a few improvements. Among the most interesting I see are initial USB support and virtual networking between qemu sessions.
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OpenOffice.org 2.0.1
The first maintenance release for Openoffice.org 2 has been released sometime today according to Betanews.com. It’s mainly a bugfix release. I didn’t see an official announcement on their main site, but there is a link to some of the details that have been fixed. (The link is for one of the release candidates.)
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The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 4
OK, the urpmi upgrade did not go very well. I got into an unworkable corner with URPMI (segmentation fault on running urpmi). Rather than try to troubleshoot or do anything fancy I’m going to move on to the boot cd and do an ftp install from that. It looked as though things went relatively well up until the restart of urpmi and segmentation fault. The first part of a urpmi upgrade usually upgrades urpmi (and it’s dependencies) itself. Then a restart of urpmi happens and it churns on to the next stage.
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Nero for Linux
The news is that Nero has announced NeroLinux a version of their cd burning software that will run under the linux operating system. The software is available in either rpm or deb binary (for either debian based or red-hat based package managed systems.) I’ve noticed that Nero install under wine with no real problems. I’ve never tried to use it for cd burning under wine as I’ve preferred either (command line) cdrecord/growisofs or (gui) k3b for cd burning.
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Sendmail mail queue backed up
Sendmail is not my favorite MTA. I really prefer Postfix, but… I have to use sendmail in a few situations. I’ve run a little script on the web server for a good while to monitor the mail queue. I was running into a problem where I had LOTS of messages backed up. I suspected I had been hit originally by a spam onslaught which had flooded the server and it had been throttled (VPS) to prevent causing problems for the other users and things got backed up.
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The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 3
Mirrors are added, now it’s time to start the process. OK, everything up until now has been preparatory and hasn’t REALLY upgraded anything. I’ve skimmed over the errata and release notes (again) at http://qa.mandriva.com to make sure there isn’t anything hardware specific or urpmi –auto-select from Mandrake 10.1 specific that I need to be aware of.
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The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 2
OK – copying of the most crucial files are done. It’s time to start the process. First I’ve gathered a list of URPMI sources that I can use from online. No local mirror this time, so it may take a while to pull all the files I need. Second, it’s time to say #urpmi.removemedia -a to clean out our list of software install sources.