FlightGear Newsletter May 2011: Difference between revisions

LinuxTag 2011
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== Development news ==
== Development news ==
== LinuxTag 2011 ==
FlightGear was presented at LinuxTag in Berlin. The FlightGear crew consisted of David Glowsky, Holger Wirtz, Mathias Froehlich, Thorsten Brehm, Torsten Dreyer and Martin Spott.
Our booth worked like a magnet to visitors - thanks to our two flight-simulator setups. A small flight-simulator with 3 TFT displays and standard joystick/pedal controls and a large and impressive setup with 10 (ten!) TFT displays and a custom instrument panel. We certainly had more displays in use than any other booth :-).
Photos on what was going on at our booth are available [http://img684.imageshack.us/g/00linuxtag1.jpg/ here].
Unfortunately, one of our five graphics cards in the big setup failed on Wednesday. What has happened? It overheated when it's fan blocked. Ironically, the fan had sucked in a warranty sticker which somehow had peeled off... So, is that covered by warranty? Or is "warranty void if removed"? ;-)
Aside from the sheer number of screens, Torstens's home-glued [[Howto: Build your own procedure trainer | "Poor Man's Procedure Trainer"]] was blessed with compliments - and it really deserves this recognition.
People really enjoyed flying at our sims - and we surely attracted some future FlightGear pilots. A few of them were so enthusiastic that they seemed to keep orbiting around our booth all day - waiting for another chance to fly the large sim. :)
When more experienced visitors were flying at our booth, we used our netbooks to secretly telnet into the sim - and cause trouble by triggering specific failures. Flights were hampered by failing instruments, stalled engines or stuck gear (or any combination for really hard cases). Eventually, everyone was properly challenged! ;-) Kudos go to Martin Spott for safely landing a combined single-engine, stuck-gear and full instrument failure emergency in dense fog. He found his way back to the airport anyway. How did he manage? Unfortunately we forgot to fail the DME - and displayed distance obviously was enough information for his navigation...
Finally, we'd like to express a warm "thank you" to those private and commercial sponsors who made this year's booth setup possible by donating money and/or equipment and giving trust into our promise to do "the right thing" with these donations:
* Local FlightGear-enthusiasts and -developers who had been buying a set of six 24" displays from their private budget in the run-up to one of the former LinuxTag exhibitions.
* Thomas Krenn AG (http://www.thomas-krenn.de/) who have been donating an extremely powerful workstation for use in development and on exhibitions - including four graphics cards - which would have been completely unaffordable from our private budgets.
* Various FlightGear-enthusiasts and -developers from all over the world who've been donating private money via our PayPal-account at "donations@flightgear.org", which eventually led to ....
* the occasion of buying another five 24" displays at an advantageous price thanks to the subsidy of Baastrup GmbH (http://www.bee.de/).
* Finally, Science + Computing AG (http://www.science-computing.de/) contributed to the affair by - guess, what - paying the insurance for all this equipment at the booth :).
== Nasal for newbies ==
== Nasal for newbies ==
== New software tools and projects ==
== New software tools and projects ==
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