Complete Transition

[GreyGeek]

Re: Complete Transition

Ah ok. Thanks.

In that case I may keep the Vista partition for WoW. I will for now, at least. Then maybe use the VM later on.

I was running XP Pro under the latest VMWare but it couldn't handle XP Hires graphics. I now run XP Pro under VirtualBox 3.0, which was just released, and it can handle Direct 3D. (For Direct 3D acceleration to work in a Windows Guest, you must install the Guest Additions in "Safe Mode"; see Chapter 13, Known limitations for details.)
http://www.virtualbox.org/

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtu...aunty_i386.deb


This page describes the download and install process which involves setting an entry into sources.list, adding the gpg key, and then using Synaptic or apt-get to install virtualbox-3.0.


http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads


My licensed copy of XP Pro with Direct 3D is running great under VirtualBox-3.0 with guest-additions.

[KeithZG]

Re: Complete Transition

Here's the thing -- WOW and other graphics-intensive games will never run as well in Linux as they do on a native Windows installation, because they are written for Windows.

True for the most part, but certainly not without exceptions. For example, I've found tons of older (but still unsurpassed in their genres, like Deus Ex) games run better on Wine than Vista, or even XP sometimes. For example, very recently a huge (1.3GB, and that's for a game that itself came on a single CD!) mod came out for Deus Ex (called, of all things, The Nameless Mod). All of my friends running Windows had frequent crashes, including people running XP, often in cases where the crash was some kind of normal game activity that would just crash the entire game every time they tried to do it. Myself, running in Wine, I never had a single issue!

My licensed copy of XP Pro with Direct 3D is running great under VirtualBox-3.0 with guest-additions.

That's only available under processors with AMD-V or Intel VT-x though, right? I ask because my current main PC is a Socket 939 AMD machine; I built it after getting a 4400+ X2 very very cheaply from a friend. At the time I remember figuring it wasn't going to be a problem at all, who cared if AMD was in the process of switching sockets/mainboard-types. Then after awhile the impossibility of getting large sticks of DDR1 RAM, or even just inexpensive extra DDR1 sticks, started kicking me.

But worse, at the time I had gone "oh, I guess 939 doesn't support AMD-V, even though the nearly identical AM2 version of my CPU does, but whatever, virtualization is so finicky and resource-intensive it'll be ages before it really takes off, if it ever does." In retrospect that was a pretty classically wrong thing to proclaim, to say the least!

Strangely enough, though, VirtualBox has "Enable VT-x/AMD-V" checkmarked on all my VMs, even though both of the options under "Hardware Virtualization" are greyed out. So on one hand it thinks my CPU supports it enough to enable that by default, but on the other hand it's aware enough of the fact that my hardware doesn't that it won't let me fiddle with those options