Games and Unix

One of the biggest arguments on why Unix is not going to beat Windows is games. Sadly for them, they are wrong. There are many options on how to play games in Unix based OS's, like "Wine", Vritualization, and Dual booting is a good way to retain game ability without looking at Unix as your main desktop. I'll go through these options, but keep in mind these are not the only options, but those that I think are the best.

Wine is a program being worked on every day, and allows many executable files (.exe) to be run in Unix. While this is not many people's favorites, some people swear by it. I have found some success with it in Ubuntu Linux, and Mac OS X, but I personally do not use it often because I do not use that many supported programs. Not to say that it is bad, but I use some weird programs at times. I do recommend it for older programs though. This usually runs them well. Sometimes better than Vista can run things from windows 98 and 95.

Vritualization is the next option that I recommend. It allows you to run (in most cases) any BIOS based operating system. Most do not support EFI, but then again, Mac OS X is the only OS that commonly uses EFI, and can not be virtualized by law (with exceptions now thanks to VMware Fusion). But for the gaming purposes, You can run Windows and Unix based operating systems with VMware products, and Virtualbox. VMware keeps their projects closed, so people can not edit them, while Virtualbox OSE (Open Source Edition) is open source and free. Please support open source when you can. It will save you money and help out the independent developers.

The last option that I will talk about is Dual Booting. This allows you to have two (or potentially more) operating systems that your computer can run. Mac now offers "Boot Camp" to allow windows to run on Apple computers as if they were PC's. This is great for gaming as you cab restart into windows, play a game, and come back to your desktop. This does require your hard drive to be partitioned, but it is so simple, you may not even know that you are doing it. Removing Windows is even easier. When it comes to PC's, if you have Windows XP or Vista already installed, you can dual boot with almost any Linux Distro (Distribution). The installers range from easy to hard.

Ubuntu Linux has come up with an amazing installer called WUBI (Windows Ubuntu Installer). This allows you to intall Ubuntu linux on a PC with windows, and requires no partitioning of the hard drive, no CD's to be burned, or used, and no additionally bootloaders to be installed. It uses the Windows bootloader to cloose between Ubuntu and Windows when starting up, and the install is held in a folder in the hard drive. It's litterally as easy to install as using any regular windows program, as it is one. Give it a try today!

Questions, Comments, Money to donate? Contact me at kdb424@gmail.com (The donation comment was a joke for those who do not know)