So, I’ve spent a bit of time talking about flightgear. Here are a couple extra resources that I want to “bookmark” here. There is a Good unofficial how-to here. (Mostly linux flightgear oriented. Also, the flightgear scenery is available here. The link is to a grid covered world map. Clicking on a grid quadrant downloads scenery for that quadrant.
Category: Windows
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Flightgear multi platform open source flight simulator revisited
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.
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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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A Tip for cleaning up an infected PC
There’s a joke that many people bring out when new Windows viruses hit big…. it goes along the lines of, “download a fix here” and the link points to a knoppix linux livecd download, or a Mandriva download disk, fedora/etc… Some say linux isn’t affected by as many viruses because it lacks market share, I would point out that server market share (take a look at how many linux web servers there are…) would seem to tip the scales a bit, but that’s not the point of this post. What is the point is this…. When you have a Windows pc that is infested what you should do is disconnect from the internet. The problem is, that typically prevents you from getting the tools you need to fix the machine.
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Antivirus update response times
We know that for Windows systems especially antivirus is a must. Up to date antivirus is the MOST important though. So how do the different vendors do in responsiveness and quick antivirus definition updates…? The SecurityFix has an article on just that today. The comparison is courtesy of av-test.org.
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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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Serious Symantec Antivirus Vulnerability
A few things to catch up on this afternoon, but first up is a Serious vulnerability in Symantec Antivirus. (It’s always serious when security software has a vulnerability.) The securityfix is reporting that a vulnerability has been discovered in the way Symantec deals with rar archived files. A specially made rar archive could make a hidden virus or worm in the archive run. It could be exploited remotely, in other words, as Symantec scans the file/attachments in email, the specially crafted rar file could make Symantec run the enclosed bug.
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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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Microsoft moving display drivers outside the kernel
In what will undoubtedly make Vista a more stable release of Windows… Microsoft will be moving display drivers outside the main kernel and run them in “userland”. Display adapter/driver problems have been one of the greatest source of instability and crashes for some time. That should make for a noticable improvement.