Greetings. >From october 17 to 26 the city of Maturín (SVMT) held the "4 Foro Mundial de Conocimiento Libre" (http://foromundial.solve.net.ve/, spanish). During this event I built a Linux Terminal Server based flight simulator using FlightGear and gave a brief talk about both the FlightGear project and my own project.
The basic idea is to have a Linux machine with FlightGear and assorted tools installed (like Atlas, for instance). This same machine acts as a booting and root server for _diskless_ machines in order to run flightgear on them, thus using local CPU and video hardware, and have those flightgear instances slaved to the master one via specially crafted startup scripts. Someone took a video of the demonstration and gave it to me last week. On the far left you'll see the machine where I'm flying (that would be the "master" machine, running FlightGear _and_ serving to the rest). Then you'll see five monitors showing the lateral and front views (35 degrees FOV). On the far right you'll see another monitor showing Atlas' moving map. And then I'll stand up and work on my laptop in order to use the HTTP and TELNET (via a Perl script) interfaces to the master computer. The hardware I had available for the demonstration was suboptimal (P3 1GHz, 256Mb RAM with integrated i815 video cards, small monitors and the network was NOT switched) so it made a couple of machines get out of sync; I showed the fact that they did not have a hard disk by rebooting one of the faulty ones. Not to mention the heat (Maturin is quite hot and even with air conditioning on, due to the crowd it was almost 90F in there while outside it was close to 100F). I did a right pattern around SVMT (not much to show scenery wise) and then flew from SVCN so people got to see our "tepuyes" (plural of "tepui" or "tepuy", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tepuy) and tried to get to Angel Falls. Since the machines did not have enough RAM, anything requiring heavy rendering would make them segfault... people were pleased, nonetheless. We ended by trying to fly out of KSFO (the person recording immediately asked "can we fly under the Golden Gate?"), did not work out as expected due to the lack of RAM and good enough video hardware but at least people got to see the machines actually netbooting and automatically starting FlightGear. Audio is in spanish and there's a lot of chatter. Most of the question were regarding hardware requirements, features (ATC, autopilot, weather, etc.). It was fun considering I came up with the idea a week before, and people in SVMT did their best to get the hardware. The video can be found in http://www.ldc.usb.ve/~emhn/demo.ogg and is encoded in Ogg Theora. Next year I expect to show a fully detailed Venezuelan scenery using STRM30, better airports and an alternative using proxying X servers. The difference will be that instead of N-1 flightgears slaved to a single master, I can have a single instance with a 270 or some FOV running in "xinerama fashion" across several X servers. I'm just checking that the X proxying allows GLX proxying too... I'll let you know. -- Ernesto Hernández-Novich - On Linux 2.6.16 i686 - Unix: Live free or die! Geek by nature, Linux by choice, Debian of course. If you can't aptitude it, it isn't useful or doesn't exist. GPG Key Fingerprint = 438C 49A2 A8C7 E7D7 1500 C507 96D6 A3D6 2F4C 85E3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
