For as long as I can remember, Aviation always sparked my interest, so it was only natural that, as a kid, I bought the F/A 18 Interceptor Flight Simulator to play Pilot on my Amiga 500 back in the 80/90 era. We've even had weekend sleepovers where a couple of friends and I took over the attic of another friend and built “cockpits” out of cardboard with cut-outs for our monitors. We basically ignored the combat aspect of it, I was just interested in the machine and flying through below the Golden Gate Bridge since the default base was in San Francisco and the virtual cockpit looked like this:

Since my quest is to use/test/progress and promote open-source, peer-made technology, really checking out Flightgear was long overdue. So, more than 20 years later I find myself back in the cockpit of an airplane sitting on the end of a runway in San Francisco, which again is the default scenery :) But the experience is nothing like it used to be. Back then, we needed an awful lot of imagination to get the level of immersion needed to experience it as fun but this time I needed to go bleeding edge and looked for a realistic Boeing 787 model

The manual was a bit vague where to install it, so I did it like this:

$ cd ~/.fgfs/
$ mkdir Aircraft
$ cd Aircraft
$ git clone https://gitorious.org/fg-boeing-787-8/fg-boeing-787-8-main.git 787-8

Then I put a link into Flightgear's DATA directroy, which is /usr/share/games/flightgear on gentoo

$ sudo ln -s ~/.fgfs/Aircraft/787-8 /usr/share/games/flightgear/Aircraft/787-8

To start flightgear with the 787-8 type

$ fgfs --aircraft=787-8

and you'll get this awesome cockpit view:

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