Gaming on Linux mint

[glyix]

Hey guys,

This is a very noob question, and I am not sure if this has been discussed at all, but here is the deal:

I am a new Linux user, and am loving it so far. I am running Linux Mint 12 KDE, and dual booting Windows Vista on my main partition. I am looking to switch to Linux for good, and the only problem is that I do like to play games on my PC. This is one of the only reasons why I am keeping Windows on a partition, other than a select few programs.

My question is this: Is it possible to play games, such as battlefield, TF2, minecraft etc, on a Windows Virtual machine inside of Linux mint 12? And if so what is it like? Is it laggy at all? If I could do this, I would delete my Windows partition completely.

With that being said, and if it is possible to game on a Windows virtual machine, can I delete my Windows partition and allow Mint to have the rest of my hard drive space, while inside of Linux?

Thanks for any help, and I appreciate your responses.

[gammelsmurf1]

Some players use "wine" and "playonlinux". Go to their website and find out if it's something for you.

[opensores]

A Windows VM inside Mint EDIT -- might be? (Dr. Hu obviously knows more about it than me) EDIT -- an option, as long as you have enough RAM. Try it and see if it works well. If it does, you might consider posting your system specs and performance results for other interested gamers.

And yes, if you decide to delete your Windows partitions, you can expand Mint to use the rest of the hard disk. You will need to do it from a liveCD with GParted as you cannot edit a mounted partition (i.e. the Linux partition you want to expand). The GUI is very intuitive.

[DrHu]

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/23792 ... est-gaming
--A VM as a possible game playing guest ?

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibilit ... name=games
--wine developer company (commercial product, but there are some trail versions), you don't need windows to use, that is it is wine + their own custom development..

Wine itself is free
--and they have their own DB of games results..

A VM on a Linux host system will use OPENGL for graphics, most windows games will need directX, and therefor won't work: applications however have no such problem.

Most VMs' so far don't support 3D acceleration in the guest session: reason, it is vitrtualized hardware being represented by the VM program, not the real hardware on the host, which might support such 3D acceleration via the appropriate binary drivers; even for Linux (Nvidia etc)

For windows games the best solution is a separate game PC or a multiboot (dual)option for when you feel like a games
--some older or DOS style games would be ok in a VM session.
http://blog.pepita.org/?p=349

Enabling D3D acceleration in Windows guests
Recent versions of Virtualbox have support for accelerating OpenGL inside guests. This can be enabled with a simple checkbox in the machine’s settings, right below where video ram is set, and installing the Virtualbox guest additions. However, most Windows games use Direct3D (part of DirectX), not OpenGL, and are thus not helped by this method. However, it is possible to gain accelerated Direct3D in your Windows guests by borrowing the d3d libraries from Wine, which translate d3d calls into OpenGL, which is then accelerated.

Probably depends on what you think of wine as a PC game player..

[remoulder]

Linux Mint Gaming Network (LMGN) is Linux Mint's gaming network

AFAIK there is no such thing, you have simply copied the text of a suggestion on the mint community site.

N.B. quoted post has been removed

[bu99zy]

For proper gaming performance and to leverage the most from your computer, Xen is probably the best virtual environment for gaming, as you can use a pass through and use your physical graphic card.

Note you will need compatible hardware, a CPU and Motherboard which supports VT-d (Intel CPUs) or IOMMU (AMD CPUs).

If you are lucky enough to have compatible hardware, you can follow this guide to set it up.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1205216/guid ... l-machine#

[powerhouse]

Is there a Linix Mint (LMDE) tutorial for installing Xen with VGA passthrough, like the one shown in the link?