What Does Mirror Mean?

[boulderskies]

Sorry if this is a stupid question. This is my first foray into FlightGear and I have just copied "mirror1" on a 2013 MacBookPro, Mtn Lion 10.8.4, 2.7 ghz, 16gb ram and have these questions:

* What does "mirror" mean?
* Do I need to install mirror 1,2, &3?

Thank you.
Scott

[Hooray]

Hi & welcome,

A "mirror" is just another "mirror server" that happens to host copies of the data you want to download - usually, download websites will have multiple of these "mirror servers" to reduce the load on a single server and evenly distribute the load across multiple mirrors - thus, you really only need to download files from a single server, because mirrors will just host exact copies of the same data - for some reason, it seems, that your browser named the file "mirror01" - whereas it should have been something like "fgfs-installer" (along these lines), but the file name doesn't matter, you can now just install FlightGear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_(computing)

[boulderskies]

Thank you for the very quick response.

This is my first install. Should I download scenery and aircraft and then do separate installs or download and install each separately? Or does it matter?

[Hooray]

it shouldn't matter - first of all, I'd suggest to get the default installation working properly, including just the default settings (c172p at KSFO) once that works, you can tweak your rendering settings to match your desired performance - afterwards, you can look at installing additional aircraft and/or scenery. If you have the bandwidth available, scenery can also be downloaded on demand, as a runtime option using a feature called "TerraSync" (Terrain Sync) - basically, FG always knows where you're flying and if it sees that you are missing terrain, it will try to download it transparently, in the background - obviously your bandwidth must match your flying speed, or your downloads will never succeed, because you're flying at 5000 kts, while downloading scenery at just 256kb/sec.