Glad to see the SuSE forum at last.

Now I can ask burning questions like why if you buy the professional version, why the
support doesn't reply to questions?

I too am very happy to see a SuSE forum here on LQ ... perhaps my email to them was not entirely wasted.

I would also like to send my special thanks to Jeremy for his unremitting relentless efforts on behalf of SuSE users. I fully understand his (Jeremy's) insistence that specific Linux-Distributions forums only become reality once the 'distributor' becomes a sponsor by providing 'participants' in the forum. Welcome to Casper, Ginny and Ross (as well as any others). Thanks also to Marissa from Novell and Sam Hiser.

Hopefully, these new 'participants' will also monitor the Linux-Enterprise forum to help with non-commercial SuSE enterprise server questions, since experimentation is the name of the game, and for many of us, paying for a support contract in an environment where we do not have a 'commercial' server, is a non-starter.

Hopefully, through this new forum, SuSE can compete, on a level playing field, with the likes of RedHat and WhiteBox.

Many thanks again. This is a great day (or maybe yesterday)!

barrys : Sorry I can't answer your question - I am awaiting with baited breath the arrival of my SuSE 9.2 package, the last boxed package I have was SuSE 8.0, and that only included 'installation' support IIRC. We shall see if 9.2 is any different. However, the old boxed package documentation is/was very comprehensive and if one RTFMs said docs there is not a lot of reason for further support from SuSE/Novell.

PS Thanks also to SuSE/Novell for openning up YAST to the GNU/Linux community.

minrich:

You are running Vmware.. I am looking 86 my XP box and run
Vmware 4.5 (the latest) on SuSE 9.1... any pointers you can give??

My goal.. is to "hopefully" play games on the XP Vmware Guest OS ..

not sure if it will work or not..

Glad to finally see a SuSE forum....

thanks to all...

hi thekat and welcome to LQ

I can't speak to running VMware on a Linux 'host', since I don't have a dedicated linux box yet. However, as to your question about running games on a Virtual Machine (i.e. a Linux or windows 'guest') I can only advise that this is not the best way. In the case of a Windows 'host' there are various restrictions on the graphics, mouse, usb peripherals, etc., that depend on the VMware version that you run. Also memory (RAM) has to be allocated from the Host and just running VMware uses a large chunk of most machine's 'reserved' memory. Only on my 2GB RAM workstation do I ever allocate 512MB of RAM to a single VM. Since using Linux Distros as VM guests, even if they are running Apache, php and mysql/postgreSQL, I have found that between 192-256MB is perfectly adequate. I can even run two Linux distro VMs concurrently with the Win XP for Tablet PCs on my 512MB tablet when setting up LAN and WLAN and cross platform (Samba) shares and ethernet printers. However, my old 384MB Dell laptop struggled to run two VM guests when one of them was a Win2Kpro machine running MS-SQL server running a Visual Accountmate Accounting package and two database driven 'Circulation' and 'Subscription' packages that interfaced with the accounting package. However as a testing/development platform VMware cannot be beat.

Back to your 'games' question: As I mentioned above graphics is not a prime mover in VMware. This is probably because most developers don't use grahics heavily on server platforms. When you create a VMware 'guest' machine, and I am assuming here that using a Linux host has the same constraints as a Windows host, the virtual machine is built using VMware graphics settings that are restricted to 1024x768 and 16-bit color and no 3D support - effectively a software video card. So it doesn't matter to the virtual machine if you have 256MB of video RAM on your host - the VM can't use it. In fact I would state that I have seen no difference in the various VMs that I have created whether run on my 32MB VRAM ATI Mobility M4 (1600x1200 max res, actually running at 1400x1050 32bit color) 866MHz 384MB RAM Dell laptop when compared against the tablet which has 1024x768 max res with a 64MB shared video RAM (i.e. it uses part of the 512MB of installed RAM).

I understand from reading other posts, here on LQ, that running games, designed to run on windows, on Linux boxes is best acheived using winex and/or cgywin etc. I understand that UT2004 can run natively under most variants of Linux with as high frame rates as under windows. My experiments, sometime ago now, to run GrandPrix 2, Monster Truck, MDK, and others under various VM's from Win98se through XP, have failed with the exception of Test Drive (5) which failed because it was uncontrollable rather than the graphics.

HTH

thanks for the informative post..
I will do some reading on Vmware.. my guess is that you
are right..
My linux host is a SuSE 9.1 pro box with 1 GiG of RDRAM..

again.. much thanks..

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, good to see Suse here. I am a Mandrake user and have never used Suse, but have heard some good things about it......

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