Linux

[Dan]

Is Linux actually any good for FS's? And if so, Which 'Flavour'?
Thanks, Dan

[ATI_7500]

Linuxm actually sucks when it comes to games,because a) there is a little number of games for that system and b) you'd need some kind of "emulator" if you wanted to play games which weren't made for linux. And those emulators don't have the best performance...

[Dan]

Xp...

[ozzy72]

Keep whistling Dan... Sadly Linux has some serious attitude towards M$ products. You could set your machine up to two OSs...

Ozzy

[gw]

Dan,

FlightGear (www.flightgear.org) is a flight simulator built for Linux primarily but also runs on Windows.

If you want FS9 on Linux you are most likely going to end up running FS9 on Windows on Linux.  There are a couple of options.  VmWare (www.vmware.com) is an excellent payware package that I use at work to run Linux on Windows but they also have a version that runs Windows on Linux.  VmWare is a PC only product because it uses the underlying CPU to execute the guest OS directly whenever it can.

There are some freeware products similar to VmWare but I don't know how far enough along they are in development.  One of these products is called plex86.

A freeware option is Bochs (bochs.sourceforge.net).  I have run NT on bochs on XP just to try it out.  This program emulates the PC instruction set without using the native hardware directly.  That means it will be slower that VmWare but on the other hand it doesn't care what the underlying architecture is so you can run Windows on bochs on a Mac, for example.  I am in the process of setting up a new PC to dual boot XP and Windows and, if I ever get around to it, I'd like to actually try FS9 on XP on bochs on Linux.

There is also a Linux product called wine that is a more direct approach to running Windows programs on Linux.  It provides the Windows API set directly without running the Windows OS.  It can run some of the simpler Windows programs but I don't think people have had much success with FS9.

gw

[Delta_]

If you want to run games in Linux you need, Linux drivers for your GFX card, and you need a program called "WineX".  That will let you run pretty much all directx apps.  The performance is amazing, i would use it but it is too much hassle for me to change right now.  I don't know if FS9 is one of the many games that work with WineX.

[Dan]

Ok, thats a lot of info. Im checking out Flight Gear now. I was looking at Linux to speed up a slow PC. How practical and easy is it to install 2 os's, WIN98 and Linux? As another question, can I run FS2002 Pro through MS DOS, would itr be any faster than '98, and how do you restart WIndows from DOS?
Thanx V much, Dan

[Delta_]

The easiest way to put Linux and windows together is, install Linux first, then set-up a FAT32 partition in Linux, install Windows onto that, then your sorted.  

To get to windows from DOS type "exit".

[Pinchaser...]

I agree with Ozzy, just do a dual boot. Put XP on one partition or another HD, and whatever distro of *nix you want on the other.