A good, quality flight simulator on the level of, or exceeding, MS's offerings has for so long been one of the reasons that I haven't more seriously considered a migration to Linux. Flightgear seems to be the best option behind the newly-Linuxized X-Plane, but I'm curious about the progress of Flightgear through 1.0 and beyond. Keep in mind that my only experience with Flightgear is using 0.9.4 on an Ubuntu Linux installation that I've been playing around with for the last few days, so some of these questions may be out of date.For instance, will there be a concerted effort to improve the quality of the terrain, specifically the textures, waterways coastlines, and auto-generating landclass data? I realize that this is likely expensive data that the Flightgear team must otherwise find a way to fund, perhaps the flightgear.org website could serve as a vehicle for collecting donations to pay for such data? Despite how open and free any project is, I realize that there are costs involved in developing it, especially something as grandiose as a 3D flight simulator.If Flightgear could be developed into a beautiful VFR sim as well as a realistic platform for testing more scientific data, it would be a real winner.Also, will there be attractive user interfaces to set up one's aircraft, airport, keyboard/joystick defaults, and other initial flight preferences? This would seem to be a requirement for 1.0, especially if Flightgear is to appeal to the general public. Eye candy is decidedly not the most important aspect, but first impressions so often play a big role in whether or not a user continues to use the product, and ease of use is a must.Finally, I'm not asking all of these questions without asking the question, "How can I help?" I'm a web developer by trade with some experience in PHP/MySQL, ASP/MSAccess, and a little bit of graphics background. As I mentioned, I'm now toying with Ubuntu Linux, but I don't know enough about programming or Linux in general to pretend to know how to build the program from source or make modifications to the program. If there's any way that I can contribute though, I'd love to know how! Realizing that the version pulled in from the Ubuntu Universal repository is version 0.9.4, I'd love to know how I'd at least just be able to build and send a compiled version to somebody to get that updated.In short, I see a lot of potential in Flightgear and am willing to help, but I'm quite the n00b at all of this!Thanks,Kenneth

this is FG`s aircraft models , i`d have to say most of them should be improved , not much perfecttly but it still working in progress , hope they could be better in the future .http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/96702.jpg

My Computer`s Data :OS : Mac OS X 10.3.6 Panther ( Chinese language set )CPU : Dual power pc G5 with 2.0GHz speed Memory : 8GB DDR SdramGraphyic Card : ATi Readom 9800suv with 2GB Video MemoryCD-Driver : Super-Drive DVD-RWDisplay : 23` Apple Cinema Display , 1920x1280 resource with 32bit colorAudio Card : Apple defualtkeyboard & mouse : Apple Pro keyboard and mouseJoystick : Apple pro joystick----FlightGear version : 0.9.6b2Simulator : YASim Screenshots export : Mac OS X Grab & Preview My computer is poor , sorry of that .

Hi Kenneth,I'm understand where you are coming from about FlightGear. It has lots of potential and what the developers did with it so far is pretty amazing. I too would like to help out the FG team however I don't have the skills required. The sad part is I majored in programming in college, but somehow found myself into a network/helpdesk support role and haven't programmed since then. My only gripe is not so much a FG problem as is a Linux problem, is that I can't get my yoke configured for it. Its a CH Products Virtual Pilot yoke, works fine in Windows, but never could get the yoke to work in Linux, so no flying with that for me in Linux.I use Linux (fedora core 3 now) off and on and have successfully compiled FG on it from source. Its not too difficult, and the documentation on the FG website is pretty good on how to do it. A standard compile from source on Linux usually consists of "./configure; make; make install" for the libraries and programs. I checked the Fedora repositories for FG last night, but they didn't have any available builds. I have no problem compiling it myself and if I had someplace to upload it to I would just to save others like yourself the time.If FG had more contributors for things like graphics as you suggested then it would definitely be a heck of a sim. However many of us are unskilled for such things, but I bet in due time it will come around. I'm looking forward to a 1.0 release even tho it may be a while off.-Robert

>I have no problem compiling it myself and if I had someplace to>upload it to I would just to save others like yourself the>time.Subscribe to the FlightGear-Devel mailing list and ask Curt to upload your package to the FlightGear's ftp.

>How can I help?The FlightGear-Devel mailing list is a better place for you to ask that question. You can subscribe to it at www.flightgear.org/mail

Very soon he can upload his resouce to FG`s FTP server .