Hey all (from doug in the boonies, retired = too much time on my hands)
Brief my-nonexistent-skills-history:
I've avoided fun/gaming on computers/screens forever.
Well, ~ 1997 I bought a joystick and a couple windows games.
Lost the joystick, but probably wouldn't help me in flight...?
I did better with the 1990's era MS Excel97? magic escape
to flight simulator that easily flew me on the moon, to a monolith.
Fast forward to now. While looking for my town's GIS tax maps,
(which I never found, just PDF's w/ lot lines,
no owner names, no tax $info. Every town is different.)
Then, under clueless town "Tax Maps" webpage, I found this note:
Please note: Parcel boundaries are intended to be used for the purpose of property assessment and should not be considered survey accurate. You will need to have Google Earth installed to view this data. For help using Google Earth go to the Help Center.....
and forget all about tax maps ( I added that here-doug)
doug> I got Earth help, yes! I have no joystick, so keyboard and mouse.
Pardon doublespacing below. Some copy/paste's do odd things for my gmail edits
(now I'm in tiny font in a battle to un-do the big effect of the above paste :)
Stumbled into install cmds for google EARTH PRO (free), worked on Linux Mint20.
(result: GOT a 58mb file named google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb)
2) sudo dpkg -i google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb
(output: Preparing to unpack google-earth-pro-stable_current_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking google-earth-pro-stable (7.3.6.9796-r0) ...
Setting up google-earth-pro-stable (7.3.6.9796-r0) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.24+linuxmint1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.64ubuntu1) ...
(DONE).
LAUNCH TO OUTER SPACE:
3) $ google-earth-pro
If you see a few continents from space, good but here's the fun:
========First zoom to somewhere you know,
use upper LH Search, enter your address or fun place.
Adjust eyes, or ignore briefly, fuzzy view of map,streets,trees,whatever.
The fuzziness disappears or changes, if you enter Flight Simulator from here.
==== PULL DOWN MENU for "Tools" has "Enter Flight Simulator".
Choose the slower plane, not the F-16 jet if you suck like I do.
The mouse now flies the plane. I want to skim over my hood.
I use my four arrow keys , mouse-moves work too but I flip out.
I know I'm missing some kind of flight/plane control, should RTFM.
I thought Flaps controlled pitch/up/down, but my Flaps stay at 40%
and I crash in hilarious various mistakes every minute or so. What fun!
Resume Flight brings all control back so off you go to die again....
I'll try to shut up now and find out if any of you already mastered? this.
Lots cheaper than a drone! Fast, Cheap, Good.... all 3? --doug