Linux people, how hard is a Linux hardware changeover?

[stilly]

So if I were to install Linux today onto my game system and then install VMware so that I can play my games and all on Windows 7, how hard will it be when I switch from an AMD Phenom 955 CPU to a new MOBO and Intel i7 or i5 CPU and all new RAM and all?

Does it make the OS freak out like windows 7 does from time to time or does it just reassign new drivers and continue on with life like nothign happened? What are the issues in doing that?

I was thinking of doing it because I am at a point now where some of my games do not like to run for some odd reason and I think it is time to upgrade to Win7 from XP anyways...

[soul]

I don't see the point of using Linux for games, if you are already on XP and comfortable with it. Both Windows 7 or even Windows 10 will work better when it comes to drivers. Win10 enforces strict signed drivers by default for safety but that can be changed for the drivers you trust. My rig is with i7, Gigabyte UD7 MB, 16g RAM and Nvidia GTX 980i. It runs perfectly fine, some software is XP era but works fine

[wvdcm3]

Generally, Linux doesn't have much trouble with hardware changes. You mentioned gaming-if you have proprietary video drivers(rather than the open-source equivalents) installed, you might have a problem there.

Many people game on Linux, there is Steam for Linux.

If you are new to Linux, and gaming is important to you, you may want to stay with Windows gaming and learn Linux at your leisure.

As for VMware, 3D acceleration is not enabled by default, see the following:

https://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_d3d_enabling_guestos.html

[nothinghere2c]

Linux doesn't freak out the same as windows during hardware changes except when your devices end up with different names.

e.g. if you re-arranged your hard disks or SSDs on the ports on the motherboard, they might end up with different targets that you may need to manually update to boot.

gaming inside a Windows Install inside Vmware, is going to take a nice performance hit.

[yellowsulphur]

If Windows 7 is running as a VM using VMware under Linux then hardware changes shouldn't effect the VM. You would need to reinstall VMware, but the VM would not notice a change since it runs under VMware. Changing the hardware settings is really simple.







If you're having trouble syncing audio to video then add this to your .vmx file.

pciSound.playBuffer = "30"

30 ms works fine for me, but 200 ms is the default.

[Cowboy T]

You should be fine, Stilly. I've done this sort of thing plenty of times. The one thing, as nothinghere2c pointed out, is to keep your disk drives, if you have more than one, in the same order. If you have only one physical drive, then you should be good to go.

[stix213]

As already mentioned, if you have multiple drives they may end up with different names and grub, or whatever boot loader you use may need a line edited, as well as startup scripts after the boot loader hands it off to Linux. If the drivers for the new hardware are already included in whatever kernel you're already running, then you won't likely even need to make any other changes for the hardware.

If you're using hardware passthrough for your video card in your Windows VM, you may need to do some driver changes in your VM or changes to the passthrough settings if you change your video card. If you're not using passthrough then your game performance will be garbage.

[stilly]

Okay good to know. Most of the Linux installs (all actually) have been on Laptops so I was not sure abotu an actual tower that can get updated and changed around if the mobo dies.

Thank you for the responses.

[Brutmor]

Linux generally handles hardware changes well as others have started. You cannot, at this time, run 3D games with acceptable performance on a virtual machine. You will want to dual boot to play windows only titles.

I use Linux for online shopping and banking. I use Windows for gaming. I use a windows virtual machine for taxes. My Linux system runs luks encryption in case of theft.

[Brutmor]

Also, why are you using vmware on Linux instead of KVM?