Beagle Board based flight simulator

Hi friends,

i am building a flight simulator as my final year engineering project.
At present, the configuration i have thought of is:
- a 3 axis accelerometer and a 3 axis gyroscope (both mounted on a
joystick) connected to a micro-controller that gives out
position data in SPI or USB
- a linux kernel running on Beagle Board
- Graphics generation using either Panda3D or VPython
- an LCD display

is this config. right?
and also:
- which linux kernel should i use?
- which input config. should i use? USB or SPI?
- Which is the best application on Linux to develop game quality
graphics?

ps : i am a novice starting out with no experience in embedded systems
or linux , and have some practice using MS DirectX.