Arch Linux

xelados

Member

Registered: 2007-06-02

Posts: 314

Website

Which app works best for virtualizing Windows?

I'm getting tired of killing my uptime just to play a Windows game, so is there a fairly simple but effective means to get Windows into a virtual machine for Arch64? VMware doesn't seem to be present, though I heard some stuff about qemu...

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sporkbox@GitHub

Noneus

Member

From: Munich

Registered: 2006-09-26

Posts: 118

Website

Re: Which app works best for virtualizing Windows?

Well gaming and Virtualization isn't possible as far as I know. The only way to play Windows games in Linux is Wine. A few places to look:

http://www.cedega.com/
http://wine-review.blogspot.com/
http://www.winehq.org/

You can install wine in arch64 from AUR: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?K=bin32-wine

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: Which app works best for virtualizing Windows?

More accurately, 3D graphics and virtualization is pretty poor (though Xen have started to develop better 3D integration). Windows games are possible as long as they are not 3D intensive, though don't expect them to run very quickly.

If you want to go the virtualization route, qemu is a great option (VMWare is proprietary ), especially if you have Intel-VT or AMD-V capable cpu as you can then run qemu-kvm.

Wine and Cedega are highly recommended for gaming if you don't want to go the virtualization route, and if you game is supported then it will run a lot faster than in qemu.

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flack 2.0.6: menu-driven BASH script to easily tag FLAC files (AUR)
knock-once 1.2: BASH script to easily create/send one-time sequences for knockd (forum/AUR)

Noneus

Member

From: Munich

Registered: 2006-09-26

Posts: 118

Website

Re: Which app works best for virtualizing Windows?

For older games I suggest Virtualbox. In AUR is a package called virtualbox_bin. Virtualbox has a graphics driver for WindowsXP which supports DirectDraw. With this you can play older games like Age of Empires2.