Ok, so another thread got me thinking if this is possible and Ubuntu looks sweet.
I found that Cedega supports every game I play. I'm wondering if anyone has tried to do this and if so, how did it go?

Also, I'd like to hear your thoughts on Ubuntu if you have installed it and given it a good run.

Cheers

free? last time I wanted to try it you had to buy it or something. If it's free now I might give it a whirl. I believe Eds uses it & says it works well, I tried to use it to play cs but I could never get slackware to play nice with my video card so gave up.

edit: free my ass

last edited by whoop at 00:01:09 11/May/07

Ahh, right you are Whoop. It seems to be a subscriber system that cost about 5 USD per month or 55USD per year. Humf. Might still give it a go yet.

If you can get away with Wine (which Cedega was based off before they went restrictedly commercial), no need to seek nor buy Cedega.

Here are some useful links:

Wine Application (and Game) compatibility database

HL2, CSS on Wine (for Ubuntu users)

WoW on Wine (for Ubuntu users)

Ubuntu Gaming Forum

I found gaming under Wine a bit of a headache 3 years ago, but I assume things have improved since then.

Enjoy.

Just don't bother - stick with your (il)legal XP and be satisified with the knowledge that you can just double click an installer or a shortcut and the game loads while the Wine/Cedega guy is trawling forums trying to work out why his mouse cursor doesn't show up or it crashes when loading up a level, etc.

Better yet dual Boot, or even WinXp for the Dx9 games Vista for Dx10 and Ubuntu for everything else.

Yeah what ticman said I was under the (admittedly noob) impression that wine would make life soo easy when it came to playing games but after spending about a week trying to get farcry working I've decided to look into vmware and/or virtualbox.

Virtual box tutorial

vmware tute

TicMan experienced the pain so I didn't have to, lol

XP ftw!

Fizzer, have you tried out Vmware or have you just started looking into it?

E.T. haven't played with it yet - plan to get into it on the weekend. Seemed like the best approach though. Wine is just soo much stuffing around.

VMware does not support 3D acceleration at all; its useless from a gaming perspective.

Jesus, Cedega isnt hard to use at all.

Iv run Steam, WoW, Farcry, C&C 3, GTA4 and some other games through it without a hitch.

Anyone still attached to the whole, zomg linux so hard thing clearly hasnt used the newer version of ubuntu, particularly the latest release. Its clean, fast and user friendly.

so whats the easiest way of running steam under linux??

Sounds like Cedega is the go!

5 USD a month, I may just be willing to give this a go. I pay 700 a year to MS for the right to use their stuff but, what the hell.

Well the $5 is for continuing updates and downloads. You can download it once and cancel your account as far as I remember. Or you can log on to one of those sites that gives out "trial" versions and test it first.

Easiest way to run steam? install cedega, point it too the steam installer, do the rest like windows.

if you pay the money you also get to vote for which games you want them to focus on etc

Jesus, Cedega isnt hard to use at all.

Iv run Steam, WoW, Farcry, C&C 3, GTA4 and some other games through it without a hitch.

Anyone still attached to the whole, zomg linux so hard thing clearly hasnt used the newer version of ubuntu, particularly the latest release. Its clean, fast and user friendly.

Do the graphics in WoW still go missing (ala, the ring around your target, portraits, certain textures, etc) ?

I havnt seen any of the artifacting in version 6 that version 5 had. It ran really well.

Another trick if you dual boot is put your games in a seperate partition (I have 3, one for windows, one for linux and one for everything else.) and then you can have a single install and use cedega to launch your games and windows to launch the same game without doubling up.

Thanks Eds.

Is it easy enough to install Ubuntu as another boot option? I already have XP media centre and Vista business as boot options.

It's a good idea to have your games on a seperate disk than your os drive anyway, since that's where swap usually lives.

Edit: I haven't tried installing an OS on top of Vista so far. But assuming grub is fine with managing the vista bootloader (it's been great for everything I've ever thrown at it) you shouldn't have issues installing ubuntu or cedega along with XP/Vista. Just by the by, you can read and write to ext2 paritions just fine under windows using Ext2IFS but writing to ntfs volumes under linux is still a bit iffy (read only access is no problem though.), at least in the distros I've used. So if you decide to make a seperate partition for your games and you feel like testing them under your linux distro, it might be better to keep your games or misc in a ext2 partition :D

last edited by icewyrm at 20:32:23 11/May/07

E.T, Ubuntu will scan your bootsector, find any other OS and add it too its own boot manager (GRUB) for you, so you dont have to do anything. I have done it with XP and recently, Vista, works fine. If you ever remove it, run your vista startup repair and that will set it back to what it was :)

ubuntuforums.org will be the most helpfull place you will find, also dont forget to check out getautomatix.org which makes setting up your ubuntu box much easier.

Cedega must be half decent... people warez it by the bucket-full

Edit: I haven't tried installing an OS on top of Vista so far. But assuming grub is fine with managing the vista bootloader (it's been great for everything I've ever thrown at it) you shouldn't have issues installing ubuntu or cedega along with XP/Vista. Just by the by, you can read and write to ext2 paritions just fine under windows using Ext2IFS but writing to ntfs volumes under linux is still a bit iffy (read only access is no problem though.), at least in the distros I've used. So if you decide to make a seperate partition for your games and you feel like testing them under your linux distro, it might be better to keep your games or misc in a ext2 partition :D

Read-only/dodgy-write NTFS access under linux is a thing of the past, the latest ntfs-3g does the job well. Going the other direction and accessing the linux partition from vista seems more difficult if its a LVM partition (which a lot of distros use by default).

Also yes you're right linux + vista is easy (at least with grub), just as long as vista is installed first since messing with vista's boot menu with bcdedit and the like seems painful. To get grub to load vista you just add the following section to /boot/grub/grub.conf (assuming you have vista on the first partition on C):

title Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

ubuntuguide.org is another very handy source of information. I'd be interested to know if there's much in the way of performance loss running a game through cedega vs running it in windows.

Can I Ask a stupid question at this point. Why do people like ubuntu better then suse or redhat?

Its not a stupid question PP. I'd like to know as well.

I'm stuck with the install of Ubuntu. It looks like you cant install it on an existing NTFS drive. Is this right? Do you have to change the partitioning on the drive?

Can I Ask a stupid question at this point. Why do people like ubuntu better then suse or redhat?

Having been a fan of Slackware and Gentoo for many years (as a software developer), I gave Ubuntu 7.04 a go today (in a Virtual Machine) from a purely multimedia and web-browsing point of view.

Ubuntu's strength is that it's configured very well out of the box. The GUI feels very Windows-like with a good default theme. For example, double-clicking the title-bar of a window maximizes it instead of the default window-shading behaviour of most other distros. Little things like this make a huge difference for newbies.

It's also got good device support out of the box, not only in terms of kernel device support, but comes with the required user-space apps too .. that you normally have to install manually with other distros. Any necessary scripts are auto-executed to get things running.

I also just witnessed Hibernate working for the first time on a linux box, with no configuration necessary on my part.

So in summary, although you can manually configure another distro to look, feel and behave just like Ubuntu ... this distro gives a very good first impression to those unfamiliar with linux, and automates many tasks that you'd normally have to do manually. So that's what makes it attractive to many people.

For software developers, you won't miss much by sticking to your current favourite distro. Hell, Ubuntu doesn't come with gcc installed by default (as you'd expect from a non-developer distro).

last edited by parabol at 23:55:45 12/May/07

Well I will admit that the first time I tried to get redhat going I had a heck of time installing nvidia drivers.

Well by heck of a time I mean I had no idea what a run level was and it took me quite a while to find the documentation to change it.

Still sounds like it could be worth a look, I have to get on the download.

Pretty much what parabol said :)

I like it because I use windows at work (and home) a fair bit and like Ubuntu on my laptop, so having the behaviour simular is great. That and its just feels faster and cleaner than windows, yet out of the box without me f***ing around it just does everything I want it too do. That said, I only really do tutorials, documents and multimedia stuff but I play games on it as well.

Unfortunatly you cant install it too NTFS. Ubuntu will want to install itself on an ext3 file system. However if you run automatix and install ntfs-3g you will be able to read and write to all your NTFS drives :)

If you ever want a quick answer, you can add me to msn eds at nemius dot com

I've just started to use Ubuntu too, since 7.04 came out. I'm dual-booting it at the moment, and it's awesome. WoW ran by simply installing Wine, that's it. Although, I do have a few gripes with it.

If you have dual-monitors, prepare for some problems. I was surprised to find that Ubuntu doesn't support it natively, I had to set it up through the nVidia control-panel, and even then, it's not as user-friendly as it is in Windows. There's issues like programs that run fullscreen sometimes stretch over both the monitors instead of just running in the one. Things like that, takes some messing around it sort out.

Also, if you play WoW, it'll run without any graphical errors (none that I saw, anyway), but (for me at least) my framerate was noticeably worse than in Windows. I was suprised to find though, games running on the Doom 3 engine can be natively installed on Ubuntu.

So, as a complete Linux noob, I found Ubuntu pretty nice to use. It seems to do everything Windows does just as well, if not better (apart from the mentioned problems above). I'd -love- to swap over to it permanently, but until it gets more developer support, it probably wont happen. I haven't re-read any of this, so I hope it made sense.

Well, the end verdict for me is that I cant install it at the moment. I have all 3 partitions set up as NTFS and dont have the space or the patiebce to move s***e around and reformat just to experiment. Bugga.

In the mean time though, I have found this neat 3D desktop thingy for Vista that makes me feel more like I have Beryl :)

http://chsalmon.club.fr/index.php?en/Download

you are able to boot linux using an ext2/3 image stored as a file on a fat32 partition, i'd imagine it would be technically possible to do the same with ntfs

If you leave some unpartitioned space on the drive you want to install it to, and go into the Ubuntu setup, it'll have an option that says something along the lines of "Use the Largest Continuous Free Space" under the partition setup. That'll automatically format that space and install it there with a swap partition (which I think is kind of like the Linux equivalent of a page-file). Worked great for me.

Ubuntu just resized my NTFS partition for me.

Ubuntu is pretty rad! I like the UI over windows. The windows game support is pretty good with Cedega. The ATI support isn't that great. The NVIDIA support nowadays is pretty good apparently. ATI are opening up the specs on their cards I think. It has done the most of what I've wanted it to do which is listen to mp3's, surf the net, play some games, write some documents, download and burn new linux iso's and use some network tools.

things in Linux that has been a pain/hasn't worked:

-Good ati support - still pretty good... can play q3, war3, etc.
-Bridging between a WLAN and a wired lan has issues and complications.
-Good virtual drive support(I know you can mount an .iso but nothing proprietary)

That's it.. I'd prob have more of a pain in windows heheh...

It is still awesome though!

there are tools to convert from .bin to .iso and whatever

there are tools to convert from .bin to .iso and whatever

Funnily it's called bin2iso

http://users.andara.com/~doiron/bin2iso/

yeah it is a bit of a pain in the arse tho when something like daemon mounts anything you throw at it :/

last edited by Morgan at 00:06:55 15/May/07

And that's why I still run Windows (Vista now). Don't get me wrong - I'm keen for Linux (it's a huge part of my job) but for desktop OSes I'll pick XP/Vista because it's just easy.

I spend all day working on problems at work so the last thing I want to do is go home and spend ages trying to do a task that can be done in Windows with the click of a button.

f***in' a ticman

i've been running just Ubuntu 7.04 on my new computer but to be fair I don't really do any serious gaming, other than the odd CS:S game (soon to be just TF2 though) and I plan to do some hardcore Civ4 and Oblivion in the near future as both apparently work quite well under Wine.

It's been a hassle at times but I'm appreciating some of the differences and am looking forward to getting some digital tuner cards and setting up mythtv.

ticman for president

i work with unix all day, i dont want the hassle when i get home, i just want to do my thang

until windows prevents me from doing my thang (DRM) ill keep using it just coz its simple and it works

VMware does not support 3D acceleration at all; its useless from a gaming perspective.

hrm VMware beta3 for macintel supports directX 8.1. Granted it's a limited subset of games but the implementation is evolving. I can play GTA3 in a VM under OSX okish (probably video chipset limitation more than anything)

VMware workstation supports directx hardware acceleration.

It's a hidden option somewhere.

VMware workstation supports directx hardware acceleration.

It's a hidden option somewhere.

I googled it but all I could find was guides on how to turn it on, followed by craploads of people complaining of problems.

Also: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_vidsound_d3d.html

"VMware Workstation includes experimental support for Direct3D video acceleration. This feature is not fully functional."

There is a cedega version for Mac OSX as well, although its called something different, its made by the same company.

I'm going to have to go out on a limb here, and agree with TicMan.

Wow, it's not like you to take chances, Gimpy :P

I downloaded the latest Ubuntu distro earlier this month. I'm just backing up the half terrabyte of crap I've built up on my HDD's before I give it a go, just in case. I also need to buy a blank CD, haven't even looked at them for like 2 years. I hear really good things about ubuntu in terms of games and multimedia. I hear that Ubuntu and Fedora are the best distros for noobs. I'm told that the key difference though is that Fedora Core is just for complete noobs in general, and Ubuntu is aimed more at people who are not computer illiterate but just newish to Linux. Can anybody back that up?

At the moment my pc is about 80% multimedia centre, 10% work and other tasks, 10% gaming. Taking that into account I figure I should just switch to Linux instead of going to all the effort of pirating buying Vista. As long as Linux is good enough for the odd bit of Warcraft 3, Oblivion, Starcraft or CS I'll be happy.