Welcome to "Boot into LINUX & LAC the EASY WAY"

Welcome to our "Boot into LINUX & LAC the EASY WAY" forum! This forum is new as of Sep2025, and it's unlike our other forums. If you are happily using your favorite LINUX distro to host LAC, you probably won't be needing anything published here. Look elsewhere for the latest Linux Air Combat install kits and tools.

On the other hand, if you're a Microsoft "Windows" user wondering how to dabble in LINUX enough to evaluate LAC, you'll find very useful tools here and this is the best place to ask for technical support.

If you haven't already heard, it's commonplace for people to store LINUX on a bootable "Thumb Drive" (or DVD ROM). Then, without making any changes to their Microsoft Windows installation, they learn how to bootstrap their PC from that Thumb Drive or DVD ROM, resulting in a temporary LINUX setup that is described as "portable" because they can take that bootstrap media with them to other computers and use it wherever and whenever they want. Afterward, they can just turn their PC off, remove the bootable Thumb Drive or DVD ROM, and reboot back into Windows as if they had never put LINUX on that PC. It's the easiest, lowest-risk way for Windows users to get started with LAC.

In this forum, you'll find pointers and links for downloading what is known as an "ISO" file from our LAC archives. Our ISO files contain LINUX with LAC preconfigured and enhanced with all of the usual companion software for easy, portable use as described above. You can download one of our ISO files to your Windows machine and, using widely available, free tools, you can then "burn" the result to a bootable Thumb drive or DVD disk for your use. An Internet or YouTube search will yield LOTS of instructions for all steps related to that. You can use any source you like for that instruction, and the information is so widely available that we don't plan to dedicate much of this new LAC forum to creating more of it. This really is "well known" information.

The popular and generally accepted procedures for all of this will result in a "Read-Only" version of LINUX which is very resistant to corruption or destruction. It's a reliable, robust setup that tends to survive experiments and commonplace mistakes, even if you end up inserting it into many different PCs over a period of years!

This forum is for asking questions about how to USE the version of LINUX that will grace your desktop after you bootstrap one of our ISO files, with particular attention to flying LAC. Of course, we have found it necessary to configure LAC "generically" for use by lots of different people, so there are a few configuration steps you'll need to follow each time you bootstrap LINUX from these tools. With a little practice, you'll find you can bootstrap LINUX in less than 60 seconds on most industry-standard "X86" hardware, and you'll be able to configure LAC for optimal use, with your favorite aircraft, and get into online flight within another 60 seconds.

You'll find that the resulting LINUX "desktop" looks and behaves a lot like Microsoft Windows. Of course there are many little differences, but if you explore the obvious, "clickable" icons and labels as if it were just a new version of Windows, you'll find you can figure it out!

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