Change the sensitivity of mouse when used as a yoke in FlightGear in Ubuntu

When you start with any flight simulator it is natural to have an unstable, mostly swinging plane. In case of FlightGear, this might not entirely be your lack of skill or experience. It might also due to the high sensitivity of the mouse in yoke mode.

The default mouse sensitivity in flightgear is  bit on the higher side. This makes the experience frustrating as you need effort just to level out the plane.

Fortunately we can change the sensititvity settings but unfortunately you have to edit some files(here 'mice.xml) manually to make those changes. I am trying to walk you through this unfortunate situation here.

For enabling users to do in-depth customization, fligthgear uses human readable configuration files to control the behavior of input devices. All of these configuration files are located in the file system partition.

To edit a file in the file system partition, with the exception of home folder, you need root access. Without the root access you won't be able to save the changes.
What you need to do here is to navigate to the location of mice.xml, open the file with root permissions and make the necessary changes.

This can be done entirely using terminal but it is a bit complicated for the beginners. We will try here the GUI way.

Step 1 : Open the mice.xml with root permissions. We will be doing this with the help of a file browser with root permissions. For that, open the terminal and type

sudo nautilus

Here nautilus is the file manager in ubuntu linux. You will be prompted for administrator password. Enter it. A file browser with root permissions will be opened. Then navigate to

/usr/share/games/flightgear

You will see a file 'mice.xml' among others in the flightgear folder. Copy the file and save it somewhere else in the hard disk. Creating a back up copy of the file helps to restore the previous state even if you mess the file up.

Rightclick the mice.xml file and open it with the text editor.

Note: If you double click the file, it will be opened in your default web browser instead of text editor.

Step 2 : Navigate to the section similar to the screenshot below

Look for this line in the section

<factor type="double">4.0</factor>

Change the number 4.0 to a lower number (2.0 would be fine) and save the file.
Next time when you open flightgear you will notice a decrease in sensitivity of the aileron and hopefully some better control.

The behavior of mouse in FlightGear is completely controlled by this mice.xml file. You can do other adjustments like changing the sensitivity of rudder, control the throttle with mouse wheel etc by editing this file.

For getting a better control changing the aileron control is enough so it is fine leave the rest as such.