Realism to the edge: birdstrikes!

Let me show you what happens in X-Plane, when you get through a fleet of well-sized birds on 150 kts!


Well, pretty much what in reality: BIRDSTRIKE!
During my takeoff roll from runway 21L at LGAV, and just after lift-off, a fleet of birds was flying above the runway (at about 100ft) and -as I wasn't aware of it- I got through with 150 kts!!

It seems that I hit a large amount of birds: exept from the dirty windscreen, I also lost both my engines and got a tire blown!! Great damage, I just managed to get down again!

The aircraft is the wonderfull freeware 757-200. Great attention to the detail on the 3D model, superb flight dynamics and realistic panel!

More cool screenshots!

Some more cool screenshots from X-Plane 9.21 on linux with Shorts Skyvan, RJ-100 and DC-7!

Issue: x-plane mistakes one external HDD with the dvd-rom!

I discovered today that the disk issue I had with the demo (x-plane mistakes one external HDD with the dvd-rom and searches for the 1st DVD in the HDD!) also exists in the full version! When I first launched x-plane, I had my external disk umounted, and that;s why it didn't appear then!

No big fuss howver, I just unmount one of my external hdds before I launch x-plane! I can live with that :-)

Some first wonderfull add-ons

I'm starting to fill-up my new simulator with add-ons, so as to bring it to my taste :-)

Two wonderful aircrafts I've found are:

• The T6 Texan from here
• The Avro RJ 100 from "The Avroliner Project" here
  
• And of course the marvellous x737 from here

As I'm flying mainly in Greece, I installed all the greek sceneries I've found here and here.

Here are some screenshots of my first flights:

Installation: Flawless, with minor issues...

Finally the 6 X-Plane 9.21 DVDs are here!! Yeah!!

I moved straight to the installation. You get the first disk to your DVD-ROM drive and double click on the "Installer_Linux" file. No need for any command line string or anything! Just double-click and go!
A nice graphical interface starts and you go as usual: select the folder in wich you want the installation, then the scenery areas you desire (BE CAREFULL here, the full global scenery takes almost 70GB of disk space!!! If you rarely fly on a specific area, you can save space by not installing the corresponding scenery. Nevertheless you can add and remove any area you like at any time after the installation) and hit next. The proccess starts and from time to time it will ask you to insert the next dvd. At my system it took ~15minutes with ~50GB of scenery.

After the installation, launch X-Plane by navigating to the folder of the installation and double clicking on"X-Plane-i686" file. Yeap, no launcher is created! However, you can create one: go to desktop (or wherever you want to place the launcher), right click -> create launcer -> and in the "Command" field browse to "X-Plane-i686" file (eg /games/X-Plane/X-Plane-i686).

When I had tried the demo, the launching of the installation and -later- the simulator had an issue with one of my external hard disks (!!) that prevent it from starting. So, I had to remove one of my external HDs in order to run x-plane!! This did not happen with the installation of the full version of X-Plane 9.21! Everything worked fine and flawlessly!

However, the first launch of the simulator diged up a small issue: Upon launching, an error showed up and x-plane closed. The error was this one:


After a little search in x-plane.org folrums, the solution was found: as fool as it might sound, there isn't any host in the host list of Ubuntu to point to your own computer (127.0.0.1) !! So, you have to create a host that points the address 127.0.0.1 to your computers name (in my occasion "vasilis-desktop").
In Ubuntu 8.04 this is an easy task: left click on the network icon on your taskbar, select "manual configuration", unlock the dialog box and go to the "Hosts" tab. There add a new host with IP Address 127.0.0.1 and "Aliases" your computer's network name.

That's it, now X-Plane launches!!

The initial Decision!

I've been using flight simulators since 1997, when I took my first PC. I've tried all versions of MS Flight Simulator (since MSFS 5), Fly 2, X-Plane (since 7.xx), Flightgear and more.... Until lately, I was stuck to MS FS. I knew that as far as flight dynamics are concerned FS hasn't much to deliver (especially in comparison to x-plane) but several very good payware add-ons (F1 ATR, Maddog, LVLD 767) saved the game!

Progressively, as my experience over computers and my demands from the grew up, I was more and more facing the disadvantages of Windows: registry fragmentation, slow response even in brand new machines, higher and higher demand on hardware (and money), safety issues..... All theese led me to Linux!

I finally took the deceision to completely move to Ubuntu Linux on February 2008 and untill then Linux is my main OS. I only retained a partition with Windows XP in order to be able to ran MS FS.

However, this reduced my fun from flight simulation, because each time I would like to make a flight I had to reboot to Windows, start FS, setup my controllers etc. If, for any reason, I had to abort the flight and do something else with my pc, I had to reboot back to Ubuntu and do my job! Very boring situations that eventually led me to stop flying!

At that point I started again to look at X-Plane. V 9.2 was out at that time, with superior graphics, very nice scenery, wonderful 3D objects and -of course- the "traditional" superior x-plane physics emulation! Furthermore, X-Plane runs natively on Linux, what means that I finally could fly a serious flight simulator without the rebooting process!

I stopped thinking and grabed a copy! That's it!