How good is VMWare?

[mart_man00]

Im trying to come up with some one to have my desktop be Linux only, but i have some Cadd apps i need and some games i cant live without :)

I think both use Directx.

How good is vmware for this? Id like VMWare to have complete access to the hardware, just like Windows would. IF i run it as root would i notice a difference? Would it use all the features off my card(windows on vm) even though Linux doesnt?

Experiences?

Thanks

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Try doing a forum search for VMware.

Interestingly enough, this topic has been heavily discussed lately.

But, if you're looking for 3D stuff, you may be out of luck. VMware isn't advanced enough to work through XFree86 and gain any decent 3D capability.

[carbon-12]

I really dont like Vmware. Its too sloow

Have you considered trying win4lin?

http://www.netraverse.com/

[MartinB]

As far as I could tell, VMWare "emulates" it's own hardware (i.e. Motherboard, CPU, RAM (Although the CPU and RAM are identified as my own), Video card, Sound card etc. so it's just a case of whether the emulated hardware support the features you require, and as far as I know, they don't support Direct-X at all.

My personal experience is that VMWare didn't like my EMU10K1 based sound card (SB Live!), and thus, did not provide any sound at all, and the one game I tried to play on it (Kana ~Imouto~, a not very demanding 2-Dimensional adventure game with only still images and text) complained about the presence of a debugger and refused to run.

And while VMWare is slow, I generally think that people exagerate this a bit most of the time. I found it ran at an acceptable speed for what little I tried to run on it.