Just another blog!

This post is about a philosophy, nothing more. I had tweeted the title months ago. I thought that I'd better write a post too. Apart from Windows, my antivirus and Microsoft Flight Simulator X; you'd be hard-pressed to find any proprietary software on my computer. I like to use FOSS everywhere. Call me a geek, my reasons for using FOSS are simple. I just cannot pay for all the proprietary software I'd require. Consider that Adobe Photoshop costs close to $ 1000, Lightroom costs $ 100, Photomatix costs the same, MS office costs around $ 500. I cannot pay so much. But this does not mean that I compromise on quality. As I've recognized in my various experiments with FOSS, free does not mean poor quality. Why is FOSS so successful? Simply because it is open, in that everyone who uses it can modify it to suit their needs. Let's consider an example. Say you are interested in a word-processing software (assuming you are one of the many idiots who do not use LaTeX. You do...

As promised in my previous post , here are my initial comments on FlightGear. The installation of FlightGear went like a breeze. FlightGear is cross platform, so it requires OpenAL and OpenGL. So make sure that your graphics card supports OpenGL. The first thing that struck me when I saw the manual was that FlightGear has to be launched with the command line. The position of the aircraft, the type of aircraft, the weather, time and many other options are passed as command line arguments. However, there is an easy GUI launcher that manages this for the user. Another disappointment was finding that most of the aircraft models shipping with the simulator were still under development. I tried my hand at the Cessna 172P, which was a production aircraft, meaning that it was not under development. Again, I must remind you that the only experience I have of sitting in the pilot's seat is in other simulators, so I can only draw contrasts with the other simulators. The first difference th...

Exam time is generally free time. So here's one more post to add to all the spam that I generate. It is a software review. The software is an open source flight simulator called FlightGear. I have been a flight simulator enthusiast for over 10 years. I started off with the DOS based 19SF, now a free download. Then I moved on to JetFighter 3 published by Mission Studios, then to FLY! by Terminal Reality, and recently to MS FlightSim X Acceleration. Why FlightGear then, you may ask. The simple answer is that I wished to see how good a free and open source flight simulator will be. FlightGear may be downloaded from http://www.flightgear.org . It is a 291MB download. The scenery comes separately, but there is an option to download scenery on the fly. Aircraft can be downloaded separately. Because of the open source nature, there seem to be loads of aircraft models out there. FlightGear can also be purchased on DVD, for a cost of US$49.99, which seems steep, considering that it is not...