Fly! /2K/2 on Linux??

[Guest angels355]

I'm sorry if this question has been asked before, but I don't suppose out of curiosity the Fly!/2K/2 series will run on Linux? Maybe the Mac version? No, ridiculous idea?Maybe on one of the window-esque versions like Wine, or ReactOS?How has Fly! Legacy been going? Will that have a Linux version?

[Guest HeliFLYer]

Hi,as I changed to OpenSUSE 10.1 x86_64 (64bit) I could not use FLY! II anymore (and btw it even did not work usable since I got a new PC hardware/videocard under WinXP SP2).As a complete Linux n00b I was curious about the possibilities of Wine and I got very hot when I saw a screenshot on a special Wine site with a running FLY! II in a Linux box.Two weeks ago I installed Wine, then the European FLY! II basic version (two CDs, no patches) and tried to get it running. Installation worked fine after copying the CD content onto hd and installing from hd.Then I got very disappointed when FLY!II started but the video output partially froze and there was no usable panel view, only working outside views.Luckily I did not give up. I changed some parameters for wine and FLY! II (cannot exactly remember what it was) and at last running FLY! II in 16bit mode did the trick!!! I made some testflights around KSFO with the Cessna and the only problem (beside the reduced video quality due to 16bit) was that I could not get my USB joystick working. Further tests were interupted by my high spirits and installing/testing a lot of other programs under Linux/Wine. At last most of those were working but FLY! II's video output got disturbed.I deleted all the Wine stuff now and will reinstall Wine and FLY! II next weekend when I have some more sparetime, hopefully!If you are interested in more details I would post some more here and a nice screenshot, of course!So as a summary I can say that it is at least possible under my Linux/Wine/hardware combination to run FLY! II under Linux/Wine. But I cannot answer the question, what is possible - other aircraft, sceneries, add-ons - one has to try.RegardsGeorg "HeliFlyer" EDDW

[Guest angels355]

Thanks very much Georg. Have you tried out ReactOS? It is supposed to be very similar to Wine, some of those things go hand in hand, it is also a Windows-esque/Linux effort. They have been around for 10 years, however they don't seem to have as much testing as Wine. They believe for example that FS9 should be 100% compatible with ReactOS, however no one has tried it out. One person on the Wine website said that FS9 requires DX9 (or maybe at least DX8), don't know if that is allowable on Linux. I'm very new to all this stuff.Flightgear and X-Plane work very well on Linux, as they offer Linux editions for Flightgear, and X-Plane comes bundled as capable of Win, Linux, or Mac.Good luck with your efforts.Their website is www.reactos.org

[Guest HeliFLYer]

Thank you for your hint. I didn't hear anything about ReactOS until now , that might be due to my Linux n00b state :-)It might be worth a try if I have some more time.RegardsGeorg

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day Georg,Mate I'm about to build a new computer system and anticipate it will use WinXP + SP2 and all patches. >(and btw it even did not work usable since I got a new PC >hardware/videocard under WinXP SP2). You are starting to make me feel nervous. What exactly is the problem with Fly! II and your above setup? Was your Win XP 64 bit.?Was it the video card? and if so what video card did you have. I'm thinking of using a 7600GS (nVidia) 512 MB. card.I'm still using Win98SE and was under the impression that most of the forum were using Win XP no problems.Cheers,Roger

[Guest angels355]

Roger,I have two Fly!2K licenses, the previous version, Fly!2 is the final vesion so far and is a complete upgrade over Fly! and Fly!2K. But thought I would mention that I have one Fly!2K on Win 98 first edition, and one Fly!2K installed on a pentium III class Asus mobo, with an old ATI card, and Win XP without SP2 and 768 mb's of ram, and it runs spectacularly on my XP computer. But it is 32 bit, and not SP2, but the colors are beautiful, beautiful skies. Don't know about Fly!2, but it seems like it should work. There are many people on this forum that use XP with I'm sure SP2 and high end machines and they are doing well. Don't know what could the the problem.Our buddy Randy R-- can't remember his last name, he has a high end machine, and he tells me that Fly! finally is reaching it's full potential on his machine. As you know the terrain textures for Fly!2 can get really dense/heavy. My pentium III class computer has a very slow processor, only 334 mhz (expandible to about 1.4 ghz) so when I install the dense scenery for LA, as I approach LA Fly!2K crashes to the desktop. But, that is just because it needs a faster processor. I can't see where there would be any problem. Randy was having bad cluster problems on his hard drive so I haven't heard from him for a long time, but if he gets back online he would probably have a definitive answer for you. You probably know Randy better than I do, if you can't find his name let me know and I can see if I still have a listing for this online name, and you can PM him.BTW, hi, how are you doing, good hearing from you!

[Guest tonyc]

My guess, not fact, but I'd stay away from win64(vista) the operating system if you want to keep things going for a long time, especially for FLY2. Essentially, if you get a powerful cpu and a good motherboard, the operating system is secondary. Win xp2 has more software and "backward" compatibility to discourage anyone other than the die hards from moving to anything else.Consider how long winxp has been around, and how many people were and are still using win98. tony

[Guest HeliFLYer]

@Roger:Hi Roger,don't worry too much!It is not a general WinXP problem but the working together from *my* special hardware and WinXP SP2.I used FLY! II and WinXP with my former PC with NO PROBLEMS (AMD 2500, 512 MB RAM, NVidia 5700 (5900???) 128 MB, 2 x 120 GB IDE hd).But when I got the new hardware (AMD 3700, 1GB RAM, NVidia PCIe 6600GT 256 MB, 1 Sata hd 200 GB, 1 IDE hd 120 GB) together with the "normal" 32bit WinXP it seemed to me that Windows did not work together very good with this hardware. Data losses happened and though I did several complete WinXP reinstalls I never got it working reliable over the time. This was one reason to change to another O/S as I need a stable PC platform for my daily work.FLY!II worked very bad on this new WinXP/hardware system - low framerates and a lot of stuttering. Other sims and games worked perfectly. Not to mention that I did some work on the render.ini and fly.ini settings and tried several different NVidia drivers. As FLY! II really has nice framerates nearly without disturbances (but be careful, only tested on the default KSFO scenery until now, with Cessna and Hawker) on an Windows ***emulator(!!!)*** (Wine) under Linux (OpenSUSE 10.1) I would say the WinXP was part of the bad game, not really good working together with my new hardware.@angels355 and Roger:I reinstalled Wine and FLY!II yesterday evening and got the same nice results. Full window display, acceptable framerates and *all* (from the basic install) worked fine beside 32bit mode (must use 16bit, hardware renderer, high resolution textures) and joystick recognition. Will do a further report after more testing and getting more experience with Wine on Linux.RegardsGeorg EDDW

[Guest angels355]

Thanks Georg,I'm not sure I understood something, how does openSuse 10.1 fit in here? I'm a little new to all this stuff. First you install openSuse then Wine is an additional program added to Suse? Or is Wine a totally standalone OS on its' own. I'm mixed up here!

[Guest HeliFLYer]

Hi angle,yes, you are right - unlike RealOS (I had a look on their webside after your last post :-) ) wine is an emulator-PROGRAM running under Linux (all actual distros, not only SUSE). There is a commercial branch called Cedega with some more game support but Wine does a pretty good work as it now also has DirectX emulation. I am pretty new with Linux so I could not test a lot but I could get several Windows programs working. To be honest, I am pretty satisfied with all that stuff coming along with SUSE and there was no problem as I worked with OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Blender and Gimp already unter Windows, so no change. But I was very happy when I got my beloved Irfanview working under Wine, this program is outstanding.Some interesting links for youRunning windowed Fly!II under Wine(btw. I am running Fly!II FULLSCREEN!)http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=3826Working simulation games under Winehttp://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php?catId=88Screenshots Wine:http://www.winehq.org/site?ss=1RegardsGeorg EDDW

[Guest angels355]

Georg,Thank you, if you have time to keep us posted on further developements that would be great. I'm also interested in Ubuntu, it looks nice, have to check it out. It's alot of fun checking this stuff out.I might also use older Windows more too.Oh, btw, check out the crucial ram website, I think it is www.crucial.com they have a very interesting listing of OS's versus how much ram they are able to address. For example Win 95, 98, 98SE only are capable of addressing 1 gb of ram, Win ME can address 1.5 gb, 2000 I think 4 gb, xp and xp pro are 4 gb, OSX is 8 gb, and Linux is 64 gb's. Well, I guess i ruined the surprised, just wrote everything from memory. So any way, if you have 2 gb's of ram or more, you'll want a more advanced OS to fully take advantage of it.Good luck, talk to you later.

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day Georg,>don't worry too much!:-eek I've just risen from Panic level 3 to Panic level 2 !!!>I used FLY! II and WinXP with my former PC with NO PROBLEMS>(AMD 2500, 512 MB RAM, NVidia 5700 (5900???) 128 MB, 2 x 120>GB IDE hd).This is almost identical with my current setup and I'm pretty happy with the operation of Fly! II but there are small stutters occasionally and I want to upgrade to a faster CPU.>It is not a general WinXP problem but the working together from *my* >special hardware and WinXP SP2.>But when I got the new hardware (AMD 3700, 1GB RAM, NVidia>PCIe 6600GT 256 MB, 1 Sata hd 200 GB, 1 IDE hd 120 GB)This is the worrying bit!!!!What's "special" about your new hardware?? It's pretty much just a standard setup?Apart from changing over to the PCI-E bus for the video card and using a combination SATA and IDE hard drive controller setup.Can you do that by the way? Mix SATA and IDE drives? Well obviously you CAN but I mean is there a performance penalty? >Data losses happened and though I did several complete WinXP>reinstalls I never got it working reliable over the time. This>was one reason to change to another O/S as I need a stable PC>platform for my daily work.You didn't mention your motherboard? What motherboard are you using?I know that SATA ( with RAID ) is not a problem to Fly! II as Randall has posted he is getting great results but I think he is still using an AGP video card. I will ask the forum.Thanks for all the info on Linux/emulation but I'm really not savy enough to branch out into the unknown. :-)Cheers,Roger

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day,The name on the tip of your tongue is Randall Rocke :-) , a true guru when it comes to technical information about Fly! Thanks for replying, it's great to see people enjoying the sim.Cheers,Roger

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day Tony,Yeah! I've no intention of going anywhere near a 64 bit operating system.>Win xp2 has more software and "backward" compatibility to discourage >anyone other than the die hards from moving to anything else.>Consider how long winxp has been around, and how many people were >and are still using win98. The only problem is what will happen should microsoft suddenly turn around and stop supporting WinXP (ie refuse to validate it anymore) This is why I see Win98SE as the best operating system to preserve. Microsoft have no control to limit it's life. Unfortunately the hardware manufacturers have simply followed like sheep and also dropped all support for Win98SE and therin lies the problem. Can't upgrade to the latest CPU chips because the motherboard don't have drivers for the older operating systems.It's a conspiracy I say! :-) Design obsolesence specifically to keep the money rolling in.Cheers,Roger.

[Guest angels355]

Georg,Check out our discussion over here:http://forums.flightsim.com/dc/dcboard.php..._id=25170&page=