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X-Plane Demo Released for Linux

Posted by Zonk on from the penguins-can-fly-now-too! dept.

sracer9 writes "The Linux demo for X-Plane has been released. Download it here. Austin Meyer of Laminar Research, the creator of X-Plane, has been reported on previously. The port to Linux has been rumoured for some time, and it's great to see it's finally arriving."

27 comments

  1. What's nice is... by advocate_one · · Score: 2, Informative

    it's a bittorrent download... someone's got sense... 21 seeds already... and no comments yet... :)

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
    1. Re:What's nice is... by cd0272 · · Score: 1

      How do u run it on linux

    2. Re:What's nice is... by advocate_one · · Score: 1

      that's what I'm waiting to find out... I won't know until I unpack the package... about an hour and a half at my max download rate... I've limited Azureus download rate to 40K/s deliberately so that ordinary web use isn't affected...

      --
      Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
    3. Re:What's nice is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      how does downstream affect your browsing? It is the upstream that gets choked on homebroadband connections. You should be choking the upstream to 40k, sir.

    4. Re:What's nice is... by I_Love_Pocky! · · Score: 1

      Right now I'm up to 36 peers with 600 KB/s. I'm rather fond of the Internet2. Web browsing is unaffected.

    5. Re:What's nice is... by I_Love_Pocky! · · Score: 1

      Sweet, I spoke too soon, by the time it was finished I crossed the 1000 KB/s mark.

    6. Re:What's nice is... by Omniscientist · · Score: 1

      How are you guys getting 1000kb/s off of BitTorrent? I usually peak at like 9 kb's (I'm on a T1 or T3)...maybe the University I'm at has a firewall in place...but there's not much I can do about that.

    7. Re:What's nice is... by I_Love_Pocky! · · Score: 1

      I guess maybe it is because we don't have a firewall that throttles our bandwidth. It could also be because the link was posted on slashdot (so there were many people trying to download it). That was the one and only time I have ever used BitTorrent.

      To be clear it was 1000kB/s (as in bytes not bits). It really wasn't that amazing, considering normal downloads from a single source come in at between 100kB/s and 500kB/s (it seems that the limitation is always on the end of the sender).

      I usually peak at like 9 kb's (I'm on a T1 or T3)

      I don't know if you meant bits or bytes, but either way that is close to the speed you would get out of a dial-up connection. How big is your university? If you are really all on a single T1, because if you are it is no wonder that your connection sucks. If it was only you using the connection the best you could do is around 187kB/s.

    8. Re:What's nice is... by Omniscientist · · Score: 1

      On FTP or HTTP downloads I usually hit anywhere from 400-600 kB's. I'm not exactly sure what connection we're on so I shouldn't have guessed like that. I'm assuming that our firewall slows down BitTorrent considerably...however I've always thought of firewalls to block access entirely to something...not slow it down. I emailed the networking company that does the stuff for our University (Minneapolis) and told them if they have any ports blocked in relation to BitTorrent they should un block them.

  2. turn your firewall off!!?? by venom600 · · Score: 4, Funny

    A snippet from the page:

    Note: Turning firewalls OFF will speed your transfer rate immensely.

    Yeah...well...there may be some other un-expected side effects of this as well. :/

    1. Re:turn your firewall off!!?? by djdavetrouble · · Score: 3, Informative

      Alternatively you could just correctly configure your router/firewall for use with bittorrent. Here's How

      --
      music lover since 1969
  3. Already downloaded last night by Omniscientist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Already downloaded this, and it does not include X-Plane 8 scenery, everything else is X-Plane 8 though I guess. It worked very nicely on my Slackware distro.

    1. Re:Already downloaded last night by DJayC · · Score: 1

      Now this isn't the actual Beta though, right? It's a demo of the beta (meaning it's time limited, right?).

    2. Re:Already downloaded last night by advocate_one · · Score: 1

      apparently, if you already have version 7, then it installs as an upgrade. But I'm not sure if version 7 ever came out for Linux and I never got v7 for PC anyway so I can't try this.

      --
      Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  4. [OT] choking the torrents by advocate_one · · Score: 1

    I only get 16K/s upstream max with my provider... I choke the torrents to 10K/s up total. I have found that having unlimited downstream torrents seriously affects my other stuff as usenet downloads have problems as well as loading in pages from the web... My daughter also complains that listening to web based radio gets messed up unless I throttle things down. Cutting down the maximum number of connections per torrent to 50 speeds things up as well.

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  5. Too late? by mandreiana · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We already have FlightGear, here's an O'Reilly article describing it's development and with screenshots: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/12/ 11/flightgear.html

    Among developers is one from NASA.

    1. Re:Too late? by Make · · Score: 3, Informative

      flightgear is a nice project, but it can't bear comparison with X-Plane, by far. X-Plane has its focus on a physically exact simulation of aerodynamics. when you design a new plane in "normal" flight simulators, you have to design both the visuals and give many many hints about its behaviour. in X-Plane, you define the shape, and X-Plane calculates the rest. I was surprised how exactly it simulates the gliders I have already piloted in RealLife(TM) (I'm glider pilot for 11 years now - glider pilots are the ones who really know how the plane works, because they need to)

      X-Plane is the only good flight simulator I know of. MS FlightSim is good to train radio navigation (it used to focus mainly on navigation before it became "mainstream"), but it gives you a really bad idea of the behaviour of the simulated planes. flightgear isn't better. Flight Unlimited (about ten years ago) used to be one of the best, and there is the German "Segelflug-Simulator", but neither have the simulation quality of X-Plane.

      I am really happy they've done the Linux port, torrenting at 40 kB/s currently :]

    2. Re:Too late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Flight Gear is junk compared to X-Plane. X-Plane is used in some FAA certified full motion simulators.

    3. Re:Too late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What type of controls do you use for X-Plane? I need to get a new USB joystick or control of some sort.

    4. Re:Too late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hello? Dude?

      What controls do you use?

    5. Re:Too late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What type of controls do you use with X-Plane?

    6. Re:Too late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey man, what kind of controls do you use with X-Plane?

    7. Re:Too late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude, what kind of controls do you use?

  6. Do you need the CD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So do you need the purchased CD to use this demo? I downloaded this and just get errors about not being able to find the X-Plane CD.

    1. Re:Do you need the CD? by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      It (should) say that it can't find the CD, so you won't have full scenery, and only have yoke for 6 minutes. This is from my experience with 7.61/Win32, mind you, but it SHOULD be the same in 8.00B13/Linux-x86.

    2. Re:Do you need the CD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, youre right. It is was a problem with OpenGL, not the CD.

  7. Please learn how to make links. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    describing it's development

    "its".

    Also, Please learn how to make links.
    <a href="http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/20 03/12/11/flightgear.html">FlightGear</a>
    (without any spaces put there by Slashdot) yields: FlightGear

    If that's too much typing for you,
    <URL:http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/200 3/12/11/flightgear.html>
    (without any spaces put there by Slashdot) yields: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/12/ 11/flightgear.html