hi there ,

ok, i have installed on my system redhat 9 and windows xp on different partitions.

i use redhat for almost everything except games and games programming with direct3d. wich
im very dedicated to.

i was thinking about removing the winxp partition and install vmware on redhat and use windows xp as a guest OS.

now my questions are:

will i be able to do EVERYTHING on vmware with winxp as guest like i did on original winxp install? with this i mean, can i play games? with hardware acceleration support? will i be able to program using VC++ and directx as my graphics library?

will graphics card and sound card drivers install correctly on winxp running vmware? and have access to the hardware full features? so what i wanted to know is.. will winxp running on vmware be as good and as stable as on a partition of its own? if the answers to this questions are "no", what will be the best solution? keeping winxp on its self partition?

thanks for your time.

PS: sorry the misspelling.

As far as I know you should be able to everything w/ VMWare, just like normal. If you're skeptical and have the extra room. Why not try installing it (while keeping your old partition) and give it a test run. If it doesn't work just get rid of it

You'd need a machine with *LOTS* of grunt,
and i really mean *LOTS* to be happy playing
games ;) in vmware.

But then, maybe that's THE way to go
for game developers, so the next game
won't *force* a hardware upgrade? ;)

Cheers,
Tink

I use vmware and I'm very happy with it. It has run every program that I used to run in windows, but it doesn't run games nearly as well. Vmware doesn't give you full hardware features because it uses a sort of abstraction layer between what windows sees within the virtual machine and what linux has access to. When I open the device manager (in W2K), I see 'VMware SVGA II' listed as my display adapter; but in reality (and in linux), it's an nvidia card.

So I'd have to say that, while vmware is great if you need to run any the few applications that haven't yet been ported to linux, it's really not a good solution for the hardcore gamer. Your best bet is to keep the XP partition (God, did I really just say that?), at least while you search the gaming forums for linux ports of your favorite games.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere