Andrew Gideon wrote in message agonline.com...
I tried to go to the AOPA Flight Planning web page today, and found that the
only option remaining is to download a Microsoft-only application. This
seems annoying.

indeed. I prefer to use a real computer myself, but there are some simple
solution: commercial solutions like I use myself (running AOPA Flight
Planning under either VMware or VirtualPC -- the former making it possible
to run it from Linux, among other things, the latter from Macintosh); or
another free solution: AOPA Flight Planning works just fine under Wine
(under linux);

just tried it a minute ago (I didn't explore the whole functionality under
Wine yet, but it looks promising); I also tried under knoppix (since I
have a very customized Linux setup, I wanted to be sure the thing would
work under a 'standard' set up easily reproducible by someone else); and
the thing fired up just as advertised.

info about knoppix can be found here (it is a very neat Debian based
distribution of Linux that boots from the CD, i.e., neat for those
who'd like to try what a real OS looks like without having to
install anything on their PC): http://www.knoppix.org/

and info about Wine can be found he
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wine/ (note that Wine seem to work
also under MacOS though I haven't tried it myself);

oh, and to be complete, info about VMware can be found he
http://www.vmware.com/ and VirtualPC here (Connectix having been bought
by Microsoft):
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/product...?pid=virtualpc

hope it helps,

--Sylvain