Getting rid of Windows

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From what I see, Windows games won't run on Linux, except for those that have a Linux version. From what I know, it's possible to make Linux more or less compatible with Windows.

I understand that Linux geeks have to play games somehow, so they know a way of running Windows games on Linux.

Office software, graphical editors and anything professional already has Linux versions that are actually free. So it's only games.

Given Linux's superiority in respect of security, like blocking idiotic trojans, IM infiltrations and the like, plus Linux's superiority in crash ratio and eating up resources, I long ago came to the conclusion that Linux is better for me.

One problem I have is that I want to be able to run Windows games. BG saga, IWD saga, Warcraft 2&3, KotOR 1&2, ToEE, NWN series, Dragon Age... you name it. In this country, it's impossible to get a game's Linux version from the distributor, and buying games from abroad via internet shopping isn't my idea of fun.

Another problem is I don't know C. I know Java, I used to know Perl, so I can understand the code. I can't write it. And it's not like I have the time or need (for any other reason than this one, that is) to learn it. And, despite my notoriety for being a geek, I've never even seen a running Linux in my life.

Any suggestions? Some Linux distribution that doesn't require you to be a C wizard, but neither does it treat you like just another user? Some free and legal Windows emulator for running games?

[ June 05, 2004, 00:12: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

Why do you want to get rid of windows?

 

Not true, my dad works at a computer security company, for the big insurance companies, after a long research, they found out that for every leak in windows, there are 10 leaks in Linux(the core Linux eh, not the distributions).

Also the sole main advantage on the security front is its unfriendlyness to users, if a user wants to open an attachment and run the program, he needs to be logged in as root, and set the program as executable, if a Linux distribution wants to be popular with the users, it would make opening attachments easier, just by pushing a button, and by then everybody will just log in as root, because that is easier, "oh look, an attachment, lets open it! *poof*"


But for an emulato, it think this one should do, Wine (not Vines )

[ June 05, 2004, 00:23: Message edited by: Morgoth ]

 

Use WineX to play Windows games, and either Xandros Desktop v2.0 or the newest SuSe Linux. They both have had good reviews, but you can always try Knoppix "Linux-on-CD" -which is just what the slogan suggests.

 

Because Windows is pure and utter trash. The only reason I use it, is because I am 99% sure I will screw up a linux install so I will accidently format my computer and then I will throw it out of the window and then I will jump on it and then...


Well, you get my point.

 

http://www.lindowsinc.com/
I think that should do the trick.

 

Why Lindows? That is the worse Linux distro ever made.

 

Not that familiar with Linux but that's the best one i've seen, as in heard recommindations and such, no real info on that one thou.

 

I've used Mandrake from time to time (the newer versions, I think 9 and 10) and didn't encounter many problems; though I didn't have to install it or do anything complex lol.

 

For starting try a Live Distribution like Knoppix. They run from the CD, so you can play with them without changing you disk.

The get a binary distro like Mandrake, Suse, Fedora(Red Hat). They are great for fresh converts and the install takes like 30mins (all graphical, no rocket science).

I use Gentoo, my install took 2 days - I compiled everything myself.

For winblows games use Wine and Winex(which is half payable). Infinity engine can be quite nicely emulated, only the speed get sometimes slower. AND there is an IE port being made gemrb.sf.net(the only decent one among many)

You don't need to know C or any other programming languge to use Linux. KDE and other desktop environments are easy to use and still powerful. Linux is all about choice, there are many programs for any given task usually.

Long live rare Penguins!

 

Well, you can get 100s of free games with linux, though most aren't that exciting (it's all about tux racer)

But there's wine and wineX (a non-free fork of the wine project with direct x support)

I remember reading that wine x can now play kotor, and many people have said that warcraft 3 runs better on their computers using wine x than it does when they are actually playing windows (there's a cvs version of wine x that's free, but you don't get any suport with it and it's missing a couple of features - if you're serious about gaming I guess that $5 a month or whatever subscription fee isn't much, and if you don't want to keep getting new versions you can stop paying)

Other options are vmware and win4lin, which actually allow you to run windows from inside linux (you can actually install windows whilst running linux), but they aren't overly cheap I don't think

Failing that you can just dual boot...


Oh, and all the statistics I've seen say that the linux kernel results in hardly any security breaches, the stuff running on top might be less secure, but it's a lot better than windows. For a start, as little as possible should be running with admin privileges, which limits the damage that can be done, this coupled with the fact that a home user should be able to keep their system fairly up to date (most security flaws that get announced are for versions of programs older than the one I'm running and so the issue has already been fixed), and won't be running any servers, so the chances of anyone getting in are small

 

Chev, porting over to Linux is fairly tough. There's just tiny little stupid things that will cause all kinds of havoc with you, at first.

Simple stuff you take for granted. Like file permissions, and mounting a cdrom, installing programs, configuring your "start menu", burning a cd/dvd. Heck, you have to get used to new file locations. For example, just about every linux use has messed around with the "/etc/fstab" file at some point. This file is a list of all the storage devices on your machine, and who's allowed to do what on where.

But there's some fairly neat stuff to it. And in my tiny bit of experience, the "multitasking" is a lot smoother. When you run stuff in the background, it runs *smoothly* in the background. And yes, the stability is noticable; it's not often you have to reboot.

I'm no guru, and I haven't played with that many distros. I started on Mandrake, and looking back now, it was an excellent distro to start with. But since I'm boycotting France, I've moved over to Fedora (Redhat). The Core2 dvd .iso is available all over, and it's a full 4 gig. That's the 3 installs, the source, and a "rescue disk". The installer and selection isn't quite as robust and fulfilling as Mandrake's, but it's very decent. Plus you get near-auto compatibility with any packages you install.

Mandrake is compiled for i686 architecture, so it's a little bit faster in terms of processing power. But Core2 is still extremely fast, and unless you're doing something cpu intensive (like running a forum database ), you're never going to notice the speed increase.

Gentoo is another good distro, that's somewhere between Redhat and Mandrake in terms of package selection and configuration. Slightly better than Redhat, but you have to compile your *entire* source code, which on just a mid-range gaming machine will take about a day (24 hours). You get the benefit of having all your optimizations included in the loadout, plus being able to select Reiser or XFS for a filesystem.

On the issue of Wine/WineX. It takes a significant amount more processing power to run the game. Stuff like tToEE will crawl (I've not tried running it on this machine, but just from past experience with other games). IwD runs like a dream, if not a tiny bit better. BG2 runs just fine. AoE2 works (HA!). And then there's other stuff like Mame and ZNES and Project64, that completely smoke.

IF YOU WANT TO MESS AROUND WITH IT, RIGHT NOW:

Download Knoppix. It's a single cdrom, and it doesn't write a single thing to your hard disk. It's tiny, there's not all that many packages, but it works. And you can see Linux firsthand, without even "risking" your system. Even if you hardware isn't completely supported (usually it's "non-critical" things like your soundcard), it'll run in a lower level compatibility mode and let you select your settings manually.

[ June 06, 2004, 03:29: Message edited by: ejsmith ]

 

Things I forgot to say...

I'd recommend either Mandrake 10.0 (they might try and convince you to pay for downloading it, but you don't have to, and if you'd rather order it instead of downloading it you can get the dvd/cds cheaply off the internet rather than paying mandrake (this isn't illegal, when you buy a linux product, you're paying for manuals and support etc, rather than the software). Or, try out knoppix, but remember that it won't be as fast as if you had it installed (and by default it uses KDE as the desktop, which is probaby the slowst there is)

Secondly, UT2003/4 come with the linux version on the same cd as the windows version, and I know loki made an installer you can download for the original OT. I think the linux version of quake 2 is fairly easy to install if you have the windows cd, not sure about quake 3

I'm thinking that you have more chance of playing older games like BG with wine than you do on windows xp though

to ejsmith:
I'm almost certain Mandrake is i585 optimized, not i686
And I fail to see how Gentoo is in between Mandrake and Fedora. My experiences with the 2 are that Mandrake sets up everything for you, and that Fedora tries to set up everything for you, but fails, and then insists on running hideously slowly (I know that a lot of people like fedora, and I was using FC2 test 2, so maybe that was the problem, but I just didn't like it, for several reasons), Gentoo on the other hand makes you set up most things for yourself. If you're talking about package management, then Fedora and Mandrake are both rpm based, so they aren't that different - Mandrake definitely has a package management frontend for installing stuff of the installation cd (and presumably it can use mandrakes ftp mirrors too), and I'd be suprised if FC didn't have a similar thing. Both can use KPackage for handling dependencies when installing rpms that the distro doesn't support

Reasons why I wouldn't recommend Fedora:

IMO they horribly butcher the gnome and kde desktops, making them almost identical (but doing a very good job of trying to hide the command line in kde, unless things have changed). I guess this is a matter of taste though

It didn't setup my sound card correctly, which even slackware managed to do (debian didn't but debian isn't supposed to be a newbie distro that should just work)

It didn't detect my screen properly, so I had to tell it about that (not a major thing though, but every other distro that tried managed, even debian as long as I wasn't using the "stable" version (the unstable and testing versions are perfectly stable, but don't have the same outdated packages)

You won't be able to play mp3s without getting 3rd party (i.e. stuff not supported/shipped by red hat) software

You can't even read stuff on an ntfs partition without changing the kernel (which could be a problem if you want to dual boot)

Red Hat (and therefore Fedora) insist on doing things in a non-standard way, and that's probably not a good thing for someone trying to learn about linux

I thought it ran slowly, but maybe that'sjustme


Another distro you might like to look into is suse (latest version is 9.1), which should be just as easy to use as mandrake. They sell 2 different versions, personal and professional, so you'd need to check which you need (personal comes with no dhcp support, so if you need that to connect to the internet you'd be screwed, and no compiler). You can download it for free, I'm not sure of the details about the 2 versions when downloading though

Good luck..

 

Well, my Old Man's stats:

Celeron 800
384 MB RAM
Riva TNT2 M64, 32 MB RAM
SB Live Value
60 GB HDD
CD/DVD 48/16

What I need is applications running smoothly, without unexpected and unexplained slowdowns, crushes and the like, as "application X screws library Y, shutting" and similar pleasantries (c) M$.

What I run on this computer is internet browsers, office software, IM and IRC clients, games. Some music and graphics from time to time.

The financial aspect is that I'm sick of Upgrades, OEMs and the like as well as programs costing fortune that have fully functional freeware equivalents. The problem with subscriptions is that I don't have a virtual wallet, nor an account, so I operate cash only.

And if I had to have a Windows CD, I wouldn't really free myself for M$ and would still have to pay them loads, anyway.

I suppose I'm going to go by Wine and native Linux clients if I switch to Linux.

What distribution, though? The first thing I associate with Linux is compiling and it isn't my idea of fun... Neither is setting modes on everything for programs to work. I really loved DOS, in so much as one can love anything M$, and had worked on it for ages, but well... the thing about modes and compiling doesn't sound like a promise of eternal fun. I can learn it, sure. I used to be a programmer. But I don't always have enough time on my hands, and something like setting modes is as annoying as debugging code.

Ah, one more thing. Should I have a FAT(32)/NTFS partition for things, or is it not necessary? Any problems with reading CDs burned in Windows? Some of my files I would hate to lose.

 

NTFS

 

Just a couple of things.

Get the horizontal refresh and the vertical refresh specs from your monitor's manual. Rather than "choosing" a monitor, just set the refresh rates correctly, and you're in there with right next to little hassle.

You've got a SBLive card. You're totally in there, dude. That TnT is completely supported, but you'll find it a bit slow on 3d games if you try to use it. A Ti4200 wouuld be an enormous upgrade, and is a good card for a Linux box; Nvidia is good about sending out drivers for Linux.

Also, I guess you can use Reiser and XFS and JFS with Core2. You have to pass a kernal switch at load. If you don't, then your only choices are ext2 and ext3; ext2 is faster, but the file system checks take a long time on large partitions (so you don't want your ISP's DNS server using ext2 )



After all the ranting a foaming at the mouth:

Chev, I honestly suggest that you download at least two, if not three, distros. Just eene-minie-moe it and pick a few, and burn them to cdr/dvd. If one hangs up or doesn't want to install or just seems to piss you off, switch to another distro. A working distro is a *good* distribution.

Also, when you download the .iso's, made SURE you check the md5 hash on the image. You do not want to get a bad image, and fin out after you've already formatted.

If you want to dual-boot with something (for whatever reason), then a FAT32 partition is a good start. Linux can read NTFS well, but you DO NOT want Linux writing to a NTFS filesystem. So, things would be flowing one way, from Windows to Linux, if you have an NTFS partition.

 

Should you have an ntfs/fat partition?

That depends what for? To install linux you should be using ext3 or reiserfs (the installation programs should be able to convert partitions to this for you). So you don't need any ntfs/fat unless you are dual booting.

You don't generally have to compile stuff (depending on your distro) but it's not that difficult when you do (sometimes as simple as just typing one command in the right directory, but there will always be a readme with the source to tell you what to do)

I can't see you having any troubles with CDs, they use the same fs type regardless of OS

You might like to check out www.distrowatch.com for a comparison of different distros. I'd certainly go for suse or mandrake. A lot of people like Fedora/Red Hat, but I'm not one of them.

Distros to avoid if you don't want to compile would be gentoo, source mage, sorcerer, lunar and LFS. Although for gentoo and source mage, and probbaly the others except LFS, compiling is simply a matter of telling them that you want to install a certain package, and they fetch the source and do everything for you. It can be a long process though

Btw, perl is a good langauge to know in the unix (and therefore linux) world, though unless you actually want to do something "clever" you won't need to do any programming anyway

 

Just a note on Gentoo. It has binary packages too and they're working on making more available. A stage3 install should be really quick.

After a live distro, mandrake/suse/fedora are a good choice for a while. But one day you'll wake up with all the dependencies screwed or wont be able to find a certain package or make it work...

 

I can get some huge Mandrake distribution in some magazine here for a couple bucks equivalent (less than 1/20 of what XP costs), with lots of things included, apparently. After all, even NT or XP are just one CD. It would save me the time burning an iso. I would burn my precious data onto a couple CDs or move them onto my brother's hard disk or whatever, and it would be done quickly... I guess.

Is SuSe or Gentoo substantially better than Mandrake?

As for the graphics, the good thing is that getting Linux for free would leave some spare $$$ to buy a good card finally. The Old Man would be able to handle a few games yet before I have to gut him and stuff with new guts. It would make sense for NWN and KotOR 1&2 as well as Warcraft 3, I guess.

Perl is OK with me, too. I used to know it (I was deep into webbies once). It won't hurt to be able to make a CGI script or two as well, apart from tampering with the system.

Thanks, guys! I mean, unless you have any further suggestions and I'd really appreciate everything

[ June 06, 2004, 22:28: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

I had slack, mandrake and shortly tried some others and now i'm on Gentoo and VERY pleased. It's working like a charm. The Portage system makes you really lazy - you just say what you want and it downloads it, compiles it (if neccessary) and installs it automatically. And tackles dependencies too
Plus, you can optimize it as you please...
The slogan is true: "All is about choice"

Oh and the Gentoo documentation is great. I suggest reading the install guide to any linux user...

[ June 07, 2004, 13:53: Message edited by: Lynx Lupo ]