bayvista170 wrote in Mon Jun 14, 2021 2:44 am:Help please. I can't get going.
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(1) How do I use my joystick instead of a mouse?
(2) How do I steer using a Joystick. It seems to me that its is only for controlling flight.
(3) I thought planes could control direction when taxiing using wheel brakes?
re 3: yes, using different keys:
'b' is for all brakes
',' (comma) is for left brake
'.' (dot) is for right brake
See menu:
Help -> Basic Simulator Keys, and
Help -> Common Aircraft Keys
re 2: that is correct, joystick is mostly for flight control - ailerons and elevator. Some joysticks have twisting handle and you might consider using this for rudder, but this will feel very unnatural. As an alternative consider the option --enable-auto-coordination, or buy rudder pedals. If you have one or more sliders on your joystick they may be configured for things like throttle, flaps, etc.
re 1: this is a multistep process
a) make sure your device is recognised by your distribution, are there any log messages, related to joystick, when you plug it in? See the output of 'dmesg' in the terminal (or
'tail dmesg' 'dmesg | tail' if you are interested in only a couple of last lines)
b) if your joystick is recognised, a device node should be created in /dev/ (usually it is /dev/joystick0, but check what your distro is doing)
c) make sure your user has read permissions on the /dev/joystick.. device; do ls -l /dev/joy* and see what user:group this device belongs to, then check whether your user belongs to the respective group (type 'id' in terminal and see what groups your user belongs to, modify if necessary (refer to 'man adduser')). Changes to group membership become active on new login.
d) in FlightGear go to Menu -> File -> Joystick Configuration
e) before flight: move your joystick and observe whether the yoke in the cockpit moves as you would expect. If yes - have fun flying
If not, tweak some more in step d.
Hope this helps