best way to play games?

[brandonike 0]

1. If a program worked on both the latest wine and winex, which one would be faster? No need for sound or video.

2. Would I be able to run wine and x windows and a game without a desktop like KDE and save up on cpu usage and memory?

3. Are there any gui's that are faster than x windows?

[Dapper Dan 0]

I use IceWM instead of either Gnome or KDE. It is lightweight and very fast. Fluxbox, another GUI, is all the rage now and in my estimation is a little faster and less cpu intensive than Icewm. Half-Life and it's mods, Team Fortress, Starcraft and Trespasser work very well on my box using winex3. If you need even less cpu, you can always sign in with Failsafe, and run a game from xterm in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. It's going to be real hit and miss, and mostly disappointing trying to run games with regular wine. You can run so many more games with winex3, many flawlessly.

[brandonike 0]

thanks for your input, but isn't "xterm" an emulator? emulators have the notoriety of being slow. I think winex would be faster.

[Dapper Dan 0]

"Failsafe" runs in "X" and gives you a terminal to run commands from. With winex3 already installed, first go to the directory where your game's executable is by typing for instance...

 

cd /home/brandon/mygamesdirectory

 

and press enter. Then...

 

winex3 mygame.exe

 

You may run into issues with your particular game that have already been discussed on the Transgaming forums.

[brandonike 0]

I'm so surprised at the fast and polite and accurate responses! linux sounds great.

[Lostman 0]

Just be ready for a little disapointment. WineX is great, but doesn't play everything. I can get a few games to run really well, but more often then not, there are issues and it's a pain to get them going.

[slartibartfast 0]

First of all xterm is a terminal emulator. It's not designed to be an emulator for Windows applications A terminal emulator is a way to execute commands as if you were on the command line.. without being on the command line. Think cmd.exe if you are coming from a Windows background.

 

KDE, GNOME and XFCE aren't GUIs. A GUI stands for Graphical User Interface, and this is about the frontend of a program. They are DE's (Desktop Environments). They come with many apps, they're packed with integration, but the main feature is that they have their own toolkits. A toolkit is a library that is used to determine how buttons, checkbox's, radios, scrollbars, etc etc look. Every app for Linux has to be written in a toolkit, even if it isn't one "built-in" to a DE, as long as you have that toolkit installed, it's fine. GTK is GNOME's, Qt is KDE's, XFCE also uses GTK, but there are some others not used by major DE's such as wxWindows.

 

As you can imagine, desktop environments are very intensive with all that integration, so some people prefer to use simple window managers (WMs). These don't have their own toolkits, but instead provide advanced features for grouping and organising windows. They are generally good for people with low spec computers or a love of the terminal You can, of course, still run GTK/Qt/<Your TK here> apps when using a WM just as long as you have that toolkit installed.

 

Running Xfree in failsafe loads the default window manager, twm, which apart from being ugly as muck and mind dullingly useless, is like greased lightning in terms of speed. Some WM's like ratpoison are faster still, but you really sacrifice usability with those. A good "first-time" WM is probably Fluxbox, Openbox3, or Kahakai. IceWM, Openbox3 and Blackbox are probably the fastest useable WMs in my opinion.

 

WineX is far from perfect. In fact, most of the games it supports either run just as well in WINE or have a native client. Contrary to what some people think, Transgaming are under no obligation to give back code to WINE because they forked when WINE was under the BSD license (Lesson in itself why, in my opinion, projects of any size / importance should be under the GPL and not the BSD license). WineX still isn't free, and I don't think Transgaming do enough to support their customers. If you want the best of both worlds download the WineX CVS for yourself and see if you still want to shell out a minimum of $15 for a 3month subscription. Although missing certain propietary libs, the overall compatibility is the same. WINE is a far bigger project, free, and at the moment has much more effort being put in to providing a compatibility layer for DirectX (particularly Direct3D). Whilst WineX is much more advanced in this area, WINE is the future for certain.

 

To answer your original questions:

 

1) I would choose WINE, it will probably be faster as the code is more refined that WineX in my opinion. Whatever works best. The moral issue is down to taste, as well.

 

2) Already answered

 

3) There are window systems out there, freely, that offer a viable alternative to Xfree86. Keith Packard's Xfree86 fork called Xserver is very fast, but is still early alpha, and doesn't have drivers from any major video card manufacturers yet, so 3D applications are a no go unfortunately. It is however, quicker than Xfree86 in rendering 2D graphics, even with generic drivers, and has nifty features that the Xfree86 devs were never bothered to implement. Another alternative is XDirectFB which is an implementation of the X server using the DirectFB thin libraries. Again this offers nifty features and is very quick, but doesn't have hardware acceleration for many cards yet, importantly none for GeForces or Radeons.

 

http://freedesktop.org/Software/xserver

http://www.directfb.org/xdirectfb.xml

 

More info on the Xserver and screenshots from Gentoo users:

 

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=106391&start=0

 

and

 

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=105184

[Dapper Dan 0]

Ya got all that brandonike?