Randy Locklair writes: > My name's Randy Locklair, I'm a student pilot and a long time developer and > I joined the list to find out a couple of things.
Hi Randy, > First of all I'd like to know what the status is of the MacOS port. > I mainly use os X lately and I'd like to get involved. If no one is > running the show I'd be happy to take over. The last Mac OS X build that I'm aware of was for version 0.8.0. Right now we are at version 0.9.2 for the most recent official release, but I haven't seen a Mac build yet. :-( We have had a couple people working with Mac OS X, but my sense is that there hasn't been a lot of recent activity. It would be great to get more Mac developers involved and get more activity going on the Mac side. I know that one thing that would be nice would be to make FlightGear a little more Mac friendly, and perhaps bundle up the result in a more mac friendly way. OSX is unix underneath, but I get the sense that most Mac people view the keyboard as a useless appendage (kind of like unix people view the mouse) :-) I once tried to go through installing the 0.8.0 Mac OS X build with a knowledgable Mac guy here locally. I'd say stuff like "make a directory, cd to such and such, now run tar to extract some file", etc. etc. He would click and drag and click and drag and copy and paste, and drop icons into text windows and other sort of strange behavior after some effort (and apparent magic) the task would get accomplished. So I think what I learned from this experience is that even though Mac OSX is unix underneath, it still might be worth some effort to make the Mac build a little more mac friendly. Even with OS X, being a mac expert doesn't necessarily mean being a unix expert. > Also, I read somewhere about you guys being at the .org pavillion at > LinuxWorld. I don't know who organizes that or if anyone is > planning to for January 2004 in New York, but I'd be happy to > organize/help with that too. We missed the most recent SFO linux world, but if we can get someone to head up a booth in NY, that would be great. I think there are a couple other developers in the area as well. We did a booth out there one year. My wife will be very pregnant about that time so I don't think I'll be able to help much myself, beyond offering tips and suggestions. I will say that it is a blast to do a booth ... you get to talk about FlightGear all day long. What could be better?!? :-) The flipside is that it is also a lot of work, and hauling equipment in and out is not necessarily an easy task. The FlightGear booth is usually pretty popular. People walk around and see a lot of nicely packaged stuff, but most of it is "static" ... maybe a tiny computer that can run linux, or some PC vendor, or boring business software, or some sysadmin tool that looks best on a 80x24 xterm, or some big name like IBM which has a big fancy booth that is well staffed by people in matching shirts handing out cool pens, but still, usually nothing too fun on the computer screens. Then people walk by the FlightGear booth and see linux being used as a platform to run a cool 3d application. It's very visual so after all the other "boring" :-) booths, we can come as a nice change of pace. :-) Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
