why is Flight Gear so slow?

[Will Backman]

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 12:10 -0400, Douglas Alves wrote:
> I installed FGFS and its dependencies from Warty's universe, but when I
> start it up, it functions in an intermittent manner: sound and movement
> for 2 seconds, silence & stillness for 2 seconds, and so on.
> 
> My desktop's characteristics: (kernel 2.6.8.1-4-686)

Run (from the terminal) glxgears and xdpyinfo.

glxgears will tell you your frame rate.  If you have proper hardware
accelerated OpenGL, you should get frame rates in the thousands, and
only in the hundreds if you are using software OpenGL.