Obstacles to total switch over

[glavanway]

I have wanted for a long time to ditch windows. I have at times actually done it, but i end up always coming back. One reason is I like to play computer games. Right now a large part of my personal computer use is in playing Modern Warfare 2. I did a small couple of searches for compatibility with Linux and the only thing I found was on serving the game. I digress, I think we should have a forum on... or rather a support group for windows withdraw and ways to over come it. Anyone know how to run MW2 on Ubuntu?

[maczimus]

Ya know what I appreciate you trying to find a way to get it to work. i have managed to get World of Warcraft and Guild Wars to work without too much of a problem

I would look into

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

Codeweavers has a subscription based application http://www.codeweavers.com/ called crossover games.

or you can install Wine in add remove which all of the above use.

When I first started using Linux or Ubuntu in this case. I used it in a virtual machine in Windows. this allowed me to play with it and learn. then i did a dual boot setup where I could either boot into Windows or Linux. I did this for a while. that way I could use Windows for Games and Linux for everything else.

Since Windows is proprietary, the code used to make it work is a closely guarded secret. The people that develop Wine have done so by reverse engineering the system calls and such to translate it in real time for Linux. You can imagine that this has taken quite some time to accomplish. and I think they have done a great job. but unfortunately Windows is just the gaming platform. although there are some companies now that are making good games that have Linux ports.

What I would do is dual boot. that way you could play games in Windows and do all the risky stuff in Linux (surf the web and such) as you have a much smaller chance of catching a virus.

Keep at it. Linux is getting better every day and some day i know it will have a large market share!!!

and come to a meeting, i am sure that we could put our heads together!!!

[glavanway]

I always thought that wine and crossover games (which I got when they gave it away free, but haven't used) worked like translators, and as such caused a delay that for high resource intensive application (Games) causes issues. Is that not correct?

[maczimus]

WINE which ironiccaly stands for Wine is NOT an Emulator is just that. not an emulator...it dynamically changes the system calls and such to those used in Linux and therefore is much faster than an emulator or a virtual machine. I have heard of people getting better framerates in wine than in Windows itself. But there is the drawback that not all games will run smoothly or at all. but they have been developing wine for over 11 years now and i think that they have done a great job seeing as they have no Windows code to go on as it is kept secret. Crossover and Play on Linux just have scripts that make installing the games easier. they do all the tweaks needed to get the game to run properly rather than having to do it yourself. I have the free lame duck edition of crossover as well and got games to work pretty well on it or at least the supported ones.