Well, currently I have Ubuntu on a slave drive in my computer, I have been working on slowly migrating over to Ubuntu but I have hit a little snag along the way... World of Warcraft. I play it like a lot more the I should be playing it, This is the only thing that is really holding me back from switching 100% over to ubuntu. I find myself still booting into Windows though because it is more convenient rather then going into Ubuntu then rebooting to go play WoW. I have even tried installing WoW via Wine but I did not get good performance with it. It was probably something that I did wrong though My question is though, Would it be possible to install Ubuntu on VMWare on my Windows computer, and have it at full screen and be able to use it with little to no performance loss? I do not really know how VMWare works so I thought I would ask the professionals first before I did that. Also, While on this subject.. Would it be possible for me to install VMWARE or Virtual PC or some other sort of emulator on my Ubuntu distro, and Install Windows on it and then WoW and be able to play in fullscreen with little to no performance loss? My computer specs are: 2GB DDR2 (PC5300) RAM VisionTek Radeon X1600XT 320GB SATA HDD Core2Duo (E6400) 2.13GHz CPU 500W PSU (I think that is all the relevant stuff) Thank you for the help.
If you don't mind spending a little cash, you could buy Crossover (comes with a 60 day free trial) and run WoW on Ubuntu . Crossover is built using WINE, which is a Windows compatibility layer. I've heard that WoW works pretty well using it. If you'd prefer to use VMware instead, you would want to install Ubuntu as the guest OS, not Windows. This is because VMware is not 3D accelarated, so you're games will not run in it.
Thanks for the information guys, I think I first have to work out the possible problem I am having with my xorg config/drivers.. I have detailed information on my problem here: Video Issues with Radeon X1600XT. Not sure what I screwed up. - Ubuntu Forums No one responded though.
I read your post. Looks like you have decent FPS considering you are using the vesa driver. ATI sucks under X, so you wont get the same FPS as you would get under windows with the ATI driver. I still think that you have plenty of horsepower to run most games.
Hmm Well it seems like I messed up something then, I cant play WoW at all.. I get <1FPS... I have seen people get well into the thousands with glxgears, I thought my 250 was low - but now that I hear ATI sucks under "X" disappoints me >.>.. Are there better Opensource drivers or something I could use rather then what I am currently doing?
I am not too sure about this driver, but ATI has a linux driver download. See here for your card. It shows that it only supports up to Xorg 7.1, if that is an issue. There is an open source driver that I have heard about but can't find. I believe that your card is too new to be supported though.
I actually have that driver installed on my computer... I think my xorg.conf file isnt set right because twice after installing thoes drivers I had to re-do xorg because I screwed stuff up.. should I be replacing "vesa" with something else? That is what the xorg file had suggested that I put.. maybe It was just using the default drivers or something?
Vesa is a very generic driver. You will need to change the driver to something else. See the instructions here. I couldn't find that information, but it should configure it for you.
Omega Drivers are a tweaked build of ATI's drivers for Windows, please don't confuse the issue further. For Linux, ATI doesn't support the platform well. They won't put the effort into building quality drivers, and they won't open-source the driver code so the Linux community can fix the drivers for them, so we're pretty much SOL when it comes to ATI hardware. NVidia on the other hand has great Linux support, where the drivers are second to none. Unfortunately, ATI's drivers are so half-hearted that 3D performance with that brand is about equivalent in FPS to Intel video. For this reason, I sold all of my ATI cards and bought NVidia when I went Linux full-time. That all said, when I was playing WoW (before I gave it up), I got as good or better FPS in Linux under Cedega than my friends did on their Windows systems. In fact, I would say that the FPS was more consistent in Linux, especially in crowded cities.
