Gerhard Wesp wrote:
sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but it's solely related to getting FG to work!
I'd like to run it on some x86 UNIX variety. Primary objective is to run FlightGear rock solidly (need it as a front end/testing environment) for my own FDM). Second one is ease of install of UNIX on hardware. 3rd is graphics performance.
I thought about Solaris. Seems to be absolutely straightforward to
install. But I don't know anything about OpenGL and GPU support.
Linux: X11 installation (especially GPU drivers) were a pain last time I
checked (requires kernel compile!). Has this changed in the meantime.
Other options? FreeBSD perhaps?
Gerhard,
I can share my thoughts based on my own experience. I'm not saying there aren't equivalent or even better ways to go, I'm just sharing my experiences.
1. These days I'm tempted to say that overall system stabililty is more a product of rock solid hardware than of the OS. Linux has been solid for many many years (as has been solaris) and recent versions of windows is pretty good now too as long as you avoid connecting it up to the internet. But I see much more instability do to questionable hardware than to questionable operating systems.
2. That said, I've been really happy with the stability of Linux. At the AOPA we had 4 copies of FG running on 4 PC's (networked together) and ran these for 3 days (shutting down at the end of each day.) But we started FG up at the beginning of the day and ran it straight through to the end. The computes, the OS, and FG was rock solid the entire time. I remember having to restart all the software once on one of the days, but I can't remember why now, I remember that I did not blame it on FG though ... we might have wanted to change the configuration or something? FG ran through all kinds of abuse, crashing into the ground, reseting positions around the USA over and over again. I thought it was a pretty good stress test and FG/Linux performed flawlessly through all this abuse.
3. I've been messing around with Fedora Core 2/3 a bit lately for my desktop machines. The nvidia drivers are a breeze to install once you figure out a couple little tricks ...
a) download the linux drivers from the nvidia.com web site
b) go to a text console (ctrl-alt-f1), log in as root and run "init 3"
c) the linux driver comes as a "sh" script so type "sh NVIDIA_DRIVER_FILE_NAME"
d) answer the questions
e) edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and change the "nv" driver to "nvidia"
f) run "init 5" to start up x11 again, and watch for the nvidia splash screen which is a good indication that everything installed correctly.
g) if you run apt-get or up2date and load new versions of X11, you probably will need to reinstall the nvidia drivers because some of the nvidia files can get overwritten.
f) you need to make sure the kernel module is installed ... that works out of the box with the default installed kernel, but if you upgrade the kernel (asside from needing to install the nvidia drivers again to get the correct module built for your kernel) you may run into trouble with your system autoloading the nvidia kernel module. In that case I've been able to create an /etc/rc.modules file (with 755 permissions) and put a single line in it that says "modprobe nvidia".
So installing the nvidia drivers on a vanilla fedora system is dead simple. If you start upgrading kernels or x11 you may need to put in a little more effort, but it's still not all that hard.
4. I haven't played around with solaris for a long time. We have had someonen contribute an solaris x86 build of FG so I know it work, but I don't know the driver situation. FreeBSD is a pretty good option, but my sense is that FreeBSD is better suited to those that want to learn (or already know) a fair bit about unix. Recent Linux versions are getting pretty good at hiding the hard sys-admin stuff from you and making system setup and maintanance pretty accessible to non-computer geniuses, although it's still unix, so the more you know about unix, the more you can tweak and the quicker you will find solutions to your issues.
5. It's been my experience with nVidia cards that overall graphics performance and overall FG performance is pretty equivalent between windows and unix given the exact same hardware.
Regards,
Curt.
-- Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
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