After an email to the flightgear-users list saying that a link to the Mac OS X binaries was broken, I went through the FlightGear Installation and Getting started guide. The following are the obvious errors due to changes in servers and feature crep of FligthGear.
If need be, I'm happy to take on the maintenance of this document. I will need to learn latex first though. George Patterson Getting Started Guide Chapter 2 should probably be move to the appendix as it is not absolutely required. Binary downloads are an easier way to the computer novice to get started. They can always compile and install flightgear from source later. Section 3.1 Installing the binary distribution on a Macintosh system Contains the link ftp://www.flightgear.org/pub/flightgear/Win32/ This should be changed to http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/binary.shtml#windows and choose one of the mirrors. A sentence should be added advising the user to upgrade to the latest version of their driver. Similar for Section 3.2 Installing the binary distribution on a Macintosh system Section 3.3 Installing the binary distribution on a Debian based Linux system Debian and other .deb (such as Ubuntu) package based distributions come with Flightgear in their respective repositories, hence install is as simple as "apt-get install Flightgear". But the manual method of first downloading the binary, then installing it is a good idea also. The links need fixing. 4.1 Launching the simulator under Unix/Linux The command show to start flightgear is "runfgfs ..." when it should be fgfs. Question: Does the shell script runfgfs exist under any distro packages any longer? (I don't recall it and I have been using flightgear since 0.9.5.) Figure 3 need updating. It shows KSFO but without any airport terminal, tower or lights. Section 4.4.3 Aircraft The guide suggests that for possible aircraft see /Flightgear/Aircraft, when it's easier generaly to type fgfs --show-aircraft. 4.4.4 Flight Model Second Paragraph mentions --aero=abcd when it should probably be --aircraft= 4.4.5 Initial Position and Orientation The parameter --airport-id= should be --airport= 4.4.9 Network Options The two parameters, --enable-network-olk and --disable-network-olk can probably be removed and instrucion on using the new MP server code structure. It's easy enough to compile the server and run it locally for large number of machines with no network connection to the outside world. 4.5 Joystick support This section could do with being reworked as it is probably the case that your joystick will work out of the box :-) 4.6 A glance over our hangar Table 1 need altering as the aircraft has changed considerably. 5.1 Starting the engine The last paragraph says "In addition, have a look if the parking brakes are on (red field lit). If so, press the "B" button to release them." That keystroke could be a little ambiguous. Perhaps shift-B would be clearer. 5.2 Keyboard Control In table 8, the keystroke ? should be added for displaying aircraft specific keystorckes eg (m/shift-M for mixture in the b1900d) 5.3 Menu Entries Menu Structure has changed substantially since the getting started document was written. Theses were the glaring bugs and annoyances that I spotted. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
