Mark Hobley wrote:
>
> I have heard that it is possible to run a virtual machine on Linux,
> which enables the running of Windows 95 or Windows 98.
>
> I think this is achievable using a product called "VMWARE".

That is one of many possibilities. I have only a litle
experience with VMWare. AFAIK it have one of the best
emulations of real PC hardware.

>
> I would like to run Windows 98 or possibly Windows XP in a virtual
> machine on my Linux PC.

That should work with VMWare.

>
> I have in the past seen Windows 95 running on an Apple Mac using
> "Virtual PC"

VMWare should perform better than that. But not as good
as running directly on physical hardware.

>
> I want to hear from anyone who has experience of such an application
> on Linux.
>
> I want to know specifically, if all hardware operates 100%.

VMWare doesn't allow direct access to your hardware. It
will use hardware, mostly through normal system calls,
and then it will emulate hardware. It emulates floppy
drivers, IDE disks, network interfaces, some graphics
board, and some more.

>
> I am interested in running some Windows 3d games, such as Battlefield
> 1942, Call of Duty and Medal of Honour.
>
> Does the 3d components of the video card work under a virtual machine
> ?

The VMWare version we have doesn't support 3D graphics.

>
> Does the virtual machine recognize the original copy protected CDROMs
> that these games run on ?

I wouldn't expect it to work.

> (Or do I need to apply no-cd patches to the games ?)

That might work.

>
> What choice of virtual machine packages do I have ?
>
> Are any of them open source ?

There are a lot of options, but AFAIK none have a
hardware emulation as good as VMWare. Projects woth
looking into are: DOSEMU, Wine, Bochs, WIN4LIN.


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In article <40094230.103459126@news.blueyonder.co.uk>, Mark Hobley wrote:
> I have heard that it is possible to run a virtual machine on Linux,
> which enables the running of Windows 95 or Windows 98.
>
> I think this is achievable using a product called "VMWARE".
>
> I would like to run Windows 98 or possibly Windows XP in a virtual
> machine on my Linux PC.
>
> I have in the past seen Windows 95 running on an Apple Mac using
> "Virtual PC"
>
> I want to hear from anyone who has experience of such an application
> on Linux.
>
> I want to know specifically, if all hardware operates 100%.
>
> I am interested in running some Windows 3d games, such as Battlefield
> 1942, Call of Duty and Medal of Honour.
>
> Does the 3d components of the video card work under a virtual machine
> ?
>
> Does the virtual machine recognize the original copy protected CDROMs
> that these games run on ? (Or do I need to apply no-cd patches to the
> games ?)
>
> What choice of virtual machine packages do I have ?
>
> Are any of them open source ?
>
> I would like to hear from anyone who has any experience of this.
>
> Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

Here's my advice. Run Windows XP as your host operating system, then run Linux in a VMware
inside it, rather than the other way around. That way you keep all the nice 3D hardware and high-end audio
capabilities, games, etc, and still have a linux box around when you need to get real work done.
Since (at least in my experience) XP exercies (and requires) the high-end 3D and audio features much more
frequently than with Linux this is a very reasonable solution (I use it on my desktop at home and at work).
I don't have any problem with my Windows XP stability.

In specific answers to your questions above:

No, not all hardware operates 100%. Instead, VMware intercepts all I/Os by the guested OS to its
hardware, and emulates the results on the host hardware. This does not expose, for example, all the 3d feetures
of your nvidia card on the host to the guest. VMware's got a special X windows driver that supports
their X server with very high performance, but this doesn't include any hardware graphics, especially
DirectX or OpenGL, just fast region blits, so far as I can tell (DMA).

Amazingly, recent versions of VMware even include sound support. I've been surprised starting up KNOPPIX
in a VMware guest box, and hear sounds coming out of my speakers!

I believe your original CDs will work even if you ran windows inside linux, but I can't verify this.
If the copy protection required a feature in the host CDROM drive, but the required feature is not provided
by the emulated/virtualized CDROM drive in the host, then it might not work. yet another argument
for running VMware on windows, rather than the other way around. What exactly do you mean
by copy protected, anyway- are people copy protecting CDs still?

On Saturday 17 Jan 2004 2:19 pm, Mark Hobley uttered these immortal words:

> I have heard that it is possible to run a virtual machine on Linux,
> which enables the running of Windows 95 or Windows 98.

Correct.

> I think this is achievable using a product called "VMWARE".

Yes. There are others like the cheaper win4lin and the free bochs but VMware
is about the best IMO and it's the only one I've used in anger. You can
trial VMware before you buy. http://www.vmware.com

> I would like to run Windows 98 or possibly Windows XP in a virtual
> machine on my Linux PC.

I've run MS-DOS 6.22, Win95, Win98SE, WinME, Win2k, WinXPPro and Win 2003
Server in VMware. I've run some versions of linux (SuSE, Mandrake 9 and Red
Hat 7.3) and FreeBSD in VMware too.

> I have in the past seen Windows 95 running on an Apple Mac using
> "Virtual PC"

I've seen Win98 running in Virtual PC on a Mac.

> I want to hear from anyone who has experience of such an application
> on Linux.

Ok.

> I want to know specifically, if all hardware operates 100%.

All my hardware works except my webcam. VMware won't do streaming over USB.

> I am interested in running some Windows 3d games, such as Battlefield
> 1942, Call of Duty and Medal of Honour.

I've not tried playing games in VMware but I've heard it won't work well, if
at all. Another thing to rememeber is VMware is a software virtual machine
that's running an OS within an OS so don't expect Windows in a VM to run
anything like as fast as it would if it was booted from a proper install.

> Does the 3d components of the video card work under a virtual machine
> ?

I've no idea.

> Does the virtual machine recognize the original copy protected CDROMs
> that these games run on ? (Or do I need to apply no-cd patches to the
> games ?)

It's a virtual machine running a genuine copy of Windows.

> What choice of virtual machine packages do I have ?

See above.

> Are any of them open source ?

Bochs is.

> I would like to hear from anyone who has any experience of this.

You just have.

--
Andy.

The reason I want the virtual machine, or some sort of windows
emulation platform is specifically for the games listed.

I have Enemy Territory for Linux.

I specifically want to run Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honour and Call
of Duty on my machine. Unfortunately these have not been ported to
Linux, hence the need for some emulation software.

Mark Hobley uttered the immortal words:

> The reason I want the virtual machine, or some sort of windows
> emulation platform is specifically for the games listed.
>
> I have Enemy Territory for Linux.
>
> I specifically want to run Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honour and Call
> of Duty on my machine. Unfortunately these have not been ported to
> Linux, hence the need for some emulation software.

You probably should check out WineX:
http://www.transgaming.com/

It's designed specifically for gamers.

--
Andy.

On 2004-01-17, Mark Hobley wrote:

> I have heard that it is possible to run a virtual machine on Linux,
> which enables the running of Windows 95 or Windows 98.
>
> I think this is achievable using a product called "VMWARE".
>
> I would like to run Windows 98 or possibly Windows XP in a virtual
> machine on my Linux PC.
>
> I have in the past seen Windows 95 running on an Apple Mac using
> "Virtual PC"
>
> I want to hear from anyone who has experience of such an application
> on Linux.

Yes, there are several ways of running Windows applications on linux, some
commercial, some free. "Wine" (http://www.winehq.org/) is the most common
of the free ones; it's in constant "alpha" level release, but seems to
work for many people. When I tried it last (several years ago,
admittedly) it was difficult to set up and offered only limited
application support. "Crossover Office" (http://www.codeweavers.com/) is
a commercial Wine derovative that claims to have addressed many of the
shortcomings of Wine, although I haven't tried it myself.

VMware (http://www.vmware.com) is probably the most versatile way of
running Windows in linux. It emulates an entire PC in memory and you can
run almost any x86 type operating system in a VMware session. I've run
Win95/98/2k and XP in VMware sessions, in addition to NetBSD and Solaris
x86. But it doesn't come cheaply -- a desktop license is about $400, and
it requires a pretty fast processor and lots of RAM for decent performance.

Bochs (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bochs/) is an open-source project
with a similar approach to VMware, although from what I hear it is not as
stable or mature. I haven't used it.

Win4Lin (http://www.netraverse.com) takes a somewhat different approach.
Instead of emulating PC hardware to run Windows, Win4Lin uses a set of
kernel patches and modules to implement Windows' APIs as native linux
APIs. The advantage to this is that resource usage is much lighter and
performance much better. The downside is that Win4Lin only supports
Windows95/98/ME, not NT/2000/XP.

> I want to know specifically, if all hardware operates 100%.

I don't think any of these options claim 100%. Wine should be able to use
any hardware that linux recognizes (not sure about USB, etc. though) but I
haven't used it much recently.

VMware emulates most hardware and supports USB devices well. 3d hardware
accelleration is not supported, since the video board is actually a piece
of software emulating a video board.

Win4Lin doesn't support 3d video stuff or USB either.

> I am interested in running some Windows 3d games, such as Battlefield
> 1942, Call of Duty and Medal of Honour.

In general I think you will find it better to keep a "real" Windows
partition around to play games, especially those that expect high
performance video support.

> Does the 3d components of the video card work under a virtual machine
> ?

Not generally, although Wine may suppor some.

> Does the virtual machine recognize the original copy protected CDROMs
> that these games run on ? (Or do I need to apply no-cd patches to the
> games ?)

In the case of emulators like VMware and presumably Bochs you will
probably have some difficulty with copy-protected CDs.

HTH

--

-John (JohnThompson@new.rr.com)

Mark you may also want to think about installing windows in a seperate
partition and setting up dual boot, not hard to do with redhat, mandrake
suse.. And you avoid many of the minor glitches that you can get trying to
run windows games on linux through other means.

On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 16:28:01 +0000, Mark Hobley wrote:

> I specifically want to run Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honour and Call
> of Duty on my machine. Unfortunately these have not been ported to
> Linux, hence the need for some emulation software.

As it has already been pointed out, VMWare offers basic SVGA drivers to
make the system look good, but it will perform very poorly using anything
3D.

I currently have Windows 2000 running as a guest under my SuSE 9.0. It
runs everything just dandy (I even use activesync over USB with my iPAQ).
It can access certain hardware through the /dev devices, thereby offering
pretty much direct hardware access (I've mounted an existing NTFS
partition read/write using VMWare and rescued another Windows installation
that way). It doesn't actually mount the devices in Linux, it just
accesses them through Linux (make sense?). Copy-protected CDs should work
fine. Heck, they work fine in Wine as well, since it accesses the devices
in similar fashion.

VMWare can be an invaluable resource for running many things in linux.
Games, however are not some of those things unless they're VERY basic
(pinball works fine... hehe).

That's where WineX comes to play! Wine by itself can play many windows
games (especially those that use the quake 3 engine, such as Jedi Knight
II and the likes). But some games, including Battlefield 1942 require
DirectX. The brilliant lads over at Transgaming (www.transgaming.com)
have incorporated certain DirectX api's into Wine, making it so MANY games
can be run in Linux, including BF1942 (the menus won't be animated, but
the game runs fine).

Check into it... it might be worth your while to have a dual-boot
system... Windows for the gaming, and Linux for... ...well, everything
else!

-Matthew

(oh, by the way, the price difference between VMWare and WineX is
INCREDIBLE!!! WineX is surely the cheaper way to go.)

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.setup.]
On 2004-01-22, Matthew Hatch wrote:

> Copy-protected CDs should work fine [in VMware].

For the most part that's true, but I've had bad luck with some e.g. the
"Oxford English Dictionary" CDROM installs fine but refuses to validate
from the original CD, meaning it can't be used.

--

-John (JohnThompson@new.rr.com)

My philosophy is: one operating system, that works.

I did try a windows on linux emulator at work in 2001. I didn't
like it. Too many problems. I told the guys to just give me windows.

It reminded me of Windows 3.1 on OS2. Slow. And lot of little
things to be aware of. And little things that just didn't work.
A lot of crashes.

My preference now is to have dual boot machines. So much of the
OS wants to control the hardware in some way. Especially
from Microsoft; they often get their apps to work, by syncing
them with the OS. And Linux ...

And, if you get a problem. Is that from Windows, from Linux,
or from the emulator software? Who knows?

Just my opinion. Keep in mind that I don't speak from much
experience here.


markhobley@hotpop.deletethisbit.com (Mark Hobley) wrote in message news:<40094230.103459126@news.blueyonder.co.uk>...
> I have heard that it is possible to run a virtual machine on Linux,
> which enables the running of Windows 95 or Windows 98.
>
> I think this is achievable using a product called "VMWARE".
>
> I would like to run Windows 98 or possibly Windows XP in a virtual
> machine on my Linux PC.
>
> I have in the past seen Windows 95 running on an Apple Mac using
> "Virtual PC"
>
> I want to hear from anyone who has experience of such an application
> on Linux.
>
> I want to know specifically, if all hardware operates 100%.
>
> I am interested in running some Windows 3d games, such as Battlefield
> 1942, Call of Duty and Medal of Honour.
>
> Does the 3d components of the video card work under a virtual machine
> ?
>
> Does the virtual machine recognize the original copy protected CDROMs
> that these games run on ? (Or do I need to apply no-cd patches to the
> games ?)
>
> What choice of virtual machine packages do I have ?
>
> Are any of them open source ?
>
> I would like to hear from anyone who has any experience of this.
>
> Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

linuxquestion@yahoo.com uttered the immortal words:

> I did try a windows on linux emulator at work in 2001. I didn't
> like it. Too many problems. I told the guys to just give me windows.

Things have moved on since 2001.



> My preference now is to have dual boot machines. So much of the
> OS wants to control the hardware in some way. Especially
> from Microsoft; they often get their apps to work, by syncing
> them with the OS. And Linux ...

I agree that dual booting is the best way to get the best from Windows and
linux but it also has the biggest drawback.

Suppose I have some software that I must use and it's Windows only. I only
need to use this software for 5 mins at a time 5 or 6 times a day. I use
linux 99% of the time which means I'd need to reboot the machine several
times a day to get my job done.

This actually happened on a job in December (I had to use some custom
written Windows software) which is why I started looking into VMware and
the like. If the software works in VMware (or other emulator/VM software) I
don't need to reboot anymore, just start the emulator/virtual machine
software and I can still use my linux apps at the same time.

I'm prepared to put up with slower speeds from the Windows software if it
means I don't have to keep rebooting.



--
Andy.

> I am interested in running some Windows 3d games, such as Battlefield
> 1942, Call of Duty and Medal of Honour.
>


If you want to play games use wine or winex