My plan for this summer (and possibly longer, depending on how it goes) is to move myself over to Linux completely - no dual booting. I'll still have a laptop running Windows for those necessary times, but that will be it. However, I'm a big time gamer so one of the first things I'm going to attempt to do under Linux is get my games working (the games I play regularly - mainly Half Life 1 & 2 and various mods - all seem to work quite well under Linux). So of course, here's my question: what's the difference between Wine and Cedega? As far as I can tell, Cedega sort of "spawned" off of Wine's source and is doing "its own thing" but they still seem to be used for the same thing. Google did not help me much, nor did searching the forums. So basically, what pros/cons are there for both and what's the main "goal" of each one? There may be a few Windows programs that I may need to run under Linux besides just games, so which one would be best to use? Or both? Thanks, guys!
well, to be as simple as possible..... wine is orientated to a general api that is windows compatible (i.e. it can run anything at all), cedega is orientated towards games (particularly with the 'click-n-play' interface), and whilst it can run other apps, games are its key. if all you need it for is gaming then cedega is more likely to be a success for you, if you check their site out they have a pretty big list of games they support and it is pretty good. do be warned, however, whichever one you choose there may be some tinkering to do. unsuprisingly, pretending to be windows and supporting direct-x is not easy, and sometimes it needs a little pointer in the right direction. with cedega this is much easier with wine, thanks to their big list of games on their site, and the forums there.
I use cedega for my ubuntu partition and surprisingly it runs my games fairly well. Note that cedega supports up to the 1.4 shader model, so you aren't going to have the cool DirectX 9 graphics instead you'll have alot of DirectX 8.1 graphics. Even so, you can run DirectX9 games just without the cool SM2.0 stuff. Iv'e ran Steam and Counter Strike source, half-life 1&2 on cedega and it worked well with decent frames per sec. Though every once and a while you'll come across some bugs and glitches, but Transgaming releases new updates to their software regularly so dont fret. Also, BF2 runs like a charm for me, but I have read of people having trouble running it. Really, it depends upon your fardware configuration. Decent hardware is preferable to run those kinds of games through cedega. Really you have to play with it to get it to run to your hearts desire; experimentation is key. Also, don't expect to run regular applications on Cedega.
I tried Cedega with I think 6 or 7 games and had different problems with every one. I gave up just before the free period. Thats just em though lots of others use it successfully.
Thanks for all the help, guys. I think I've got at least enough basic info. to get me started on working on this. I'll post when/if I get some games up and running
i think that you shoult keep windows for gaming. I am 100% under linux and i dont have windows anymore. But only game i play are ut2k4 and quake, both have linux version so i was happy to drop windows. But for you, i think you should keep windows for gamining and using linux for everythings exept gaming. thats my opinion, i dont say that it will not work, just that it is not the best solution
Honestly, if you want the best gaming experience or even a decent one, use windows. It doesn't mean that you wont have a good experience gaming on linux, I'm mean, It worked pretty well for me, but then again I'm still using windows for gaming. Why; simply because windows gives me the best gaming experience, and I can play the latest games with the latest graphics. I'm a big graphics junkie and many people aren't. Many people will go straight for gameplay over anything else, but for me its about immersion combined with the gameplay. Simply, If you don't mind not (its a double negative I know but it works) playing the latest and greatest graphics has to offer and are willing to give up that immersion to play your games on linux; go for it. That also implies that you can run your games on linux without too many glitches that make the game unplayable.
You could try vmware player, with windows xp installed on a virtual disk. I don't know what sort of speed you would be getting, but it will work for every single game.
on the contrary, few, if any, direct-x games will run in a vm. vmware does not support direct-x, and although there is a way to enable direct-x to work on a vmware virtual machine, it is unsupported and very dodgy.
I managed to get halo to work from linux, installing xp onto a virtual disk. Vmware does support directx, it just won't give you very good hardware accelaration. Like I say, halo worked fine for me, at a decent resolution (1280x768.) I don't think you'll get much better performance.
perhaps i didnt explain myself properly. vmware does not officially support direct-x (i.e. they dont provide any help or instructions for it), but it can be enabled. its still very much in developement though. it can be enabled, and it does work, mostly, but its not a be-all and end-all solution. some things work very well with it, obviously halo is one of these, but some others just dont like it. at the end of the day, its horses for courses, i tend to use vmware when i need a 'real pc' running windows to test something on, and cedega for games when i dont need a full XP system.
