Ubuntu 8.10

**Donor** · 28th December 2008, 20:46

Seriously thinking about ditching Windows once and for all.

Ubuntu is my choice for replacement of The Evil.

However, I am NOT Linux savvy - and though I was once a proud geek, I am so wickedly out of date with machinery and stuff that I feel I need help!

Problem is, I am rediscovering the joys of gaming - and a lot of the games I like to murder people in are of course MS oriented.

So, we come to things like WINE or other emulation type softwares. I know I can set up a parition and just boot between them, and I also know that for a tiny bit more RAM I could run say Win2K inside a Linux environment, but I reeeeeaaalllly don't wanna have anything to do with Windows in any way shape or form.

So, is there anyone out there clever enough, who likes banana cake and coffee/milo/beer that would be able to do over the PC of doom, and leave me open source, yet able to single handedly win WW2?

Many thanks you goodly geeky guys/gals!

**Dargor** · 28th December 2008, 20:52

I dual boot, windows for gaming debian for proper stuff/programming. I suggest you go ahead and dual boot, even if just for now. You can find out how hard getting stuff to work with wine is and that virtual machines have no 3d accel, thus useless for gaming. And if you decide you made a mistake you can go back to the MS overloards.

Ubuntu is probably a good distro to start with. it has debain package managment, wich is very good.

**Slyer** · 28th December 2008, 20:59

Stick with windows, you know you love it.
Or dualboot if you have to.

**gijoe1313** · 28th December 2008, 21:07

I see Donor has given into his passion for gaming ... I would be into my dice and paper RPGs, but I fear it would take away time from my riding (and yes it would!)

And to see Donor asking for help is like having Ixion not knowing something about two strokes

**nigel** · 28th December 2008, 23:09

I second Dargor's advice. There's movement in the 3d-accel virtualisation space at the mo (virtualbox does opengl now apparently) but it'll be a while until that's good enough for windows games.

Dual boot XP and Ubuntu. Install the XP first by the way, if you install it second it'll nuke the MBR and you won't be able to get back into Ubuntu without hax. Remember to make big enough partitions for them both while installing!

I have this arrangement, and just hibernate linux when I wanna play games.

**xwhatsit** · 28th December 2008, 23:32

Hey Nige,

I'm a Linux geek. Use Ubuntu 8.10 right now. I don't think I'm working Wed/Thu -- want me to pop round?

WINE is quite good for a lot of things. I don't have a Windows box at all now, so I have to rely on it, and 9 times out of 10 I can get it to do what I want -- but it's never straightforward and requires a lot of fiddling. Interestingly I usually get slightly better framerates, although sometimes they're appalling in comparison to when I had Windows XP on the same box.

I'd do the dual-boot if I were in your shoes; ditching Windows completely is lovely, but I reckon you'll get pissed off fiddling around with WINE eventually. And it doesn't do everything perfectly, check out http://appdb.winehq.org/ for your favourite game and see what it says: e.g., City of Heroes: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...rsion&iId=2980

What does not [work]

* Chat bug
* Depth of Field, Bloom, Desaturation
* Still occasional crashes - Audio stops, video stops, then program disappears
* Costume changer crash
* Rubberbanding bug - move over Loading banner with mouse until it becomes visible above it to avoid!
* Mouselook lags under very heavy graphical load - use keyboard turn keys to override
* doesn't start with -renderthread 1 (should be irrelevant)

**jonbuoy** · 29th December 2008, 05:50

I don't have any problems with XP - considering the amount of hardware and software that is available for it its pretty stable. Apple now seem to release just as many updates as microsoft ever did. Linux is great as an alternative for more computer savvy people. No computer Os will ever be 100% perfect when third parties are writing software for it.