On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 9:41 PM, Roger Luedecke <roger.luedecke@gmail.com> wrote:

I want to run a VM of Win XP on my laptop for games. Though I'd get more power from native, I don't want to damage the current installation of openSUSE. I have used VMware... and it doesn't seem very stable. Haven't tried VirtualBox yet. Was wondering if I should go with KVM. Frankly, I'd like to get about as close as possible to running it straight on the hardware, which is what KVM seems to do. One possible problem is that openSUSE can only use the Radeon driver, though XP has the appropriate proprietary driver.

What kind of games? Knowing this will help people provide an informed recommendation. You can play some games in an XP Guest in VirtualBox.... if your host hardware is powerful enough, but you cannot expect much performance-wise. You get a virtual video card which has absolutely nothing to do with the host video card. The virtual video card has limited capabilities. It can do some rudimentary DirectX/3D graphics, but you're looking at performance on 10 or more years ago... nothing like what a modern nVidia or ATI card can do natively. In the end.. try it. You can install VirtualBox easy enough - Oracle provides an RPM for openSUSE (make sure you include the extensions, and install the VirtualBox drivers once Windows is installed). It takes very little time to install XP in a VirtualBox guest and try out your games. KVM is limited by the same basic issues faced by VirtualBox and VMWare... you are emulating real hardware, not running 2 OSes side-by-side as if they were on real hardware. When you emulate.. you have "fake" hardware that is limited by the performance of the host system being able to process everything through the virtualization layer. If you are thinking of trying out PCI Passthrough with KVM.... it is only known to work with certain specific video cards... it might work with whatever Radeon you have in your laptop - you didn't specify either the laptop nor the video card it has - but... well... don't count on it without some interesting work including kernel patching. Performance is still below native... if you get it to work reliably. Other options that may make more sense here are: - Desura -> http://www.desura.com/ - Crossover Games -> http://www.codeweavers.com/ (this is the easiest, although it is commercial software) - Wine -> http://www.winehq.org/ - PlayOnLinux -> http://www.playonlinux.com - Linux Installers for Gamers -> http://liflg.org/ - Linux native games - there are some excellent ones such as Trine 1 and 2, Oil Rush, and loads of others C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 05/29/2012 09:41 PM, Roger Luedecke wrote:

I want to run a VM of Win XP on my laptop for games. Though I'd get more power from native, I don't want to damage the current installation of openSUSE. I have used VMware... and it doesn't seem very stable. Haven't tried VirtualBox yet. Was wondering if I should go with KVM. Frankly, I'd like to get about as close as possible to running it straight on the hardware, which is what KVM seems to do. One possible problem is that openSUSE can only use the Radeon driver, though XP has the appropriate proprietary driver.

What's wrong with your VMware installation? I've been using VMware (the Workstation edition) on OpenSuse at last since Workstation 3.2 back in 2002, and never experienced a problem. Admitted, I've never tried games - yes, I'm working with it ... ;-) Have a nice day, Berny -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org