I asked the wizards at the last meeting about getting some sort of accelerated/3d video working in a win7 guest on a linux host, so the wife can run her favorite win7(only!)-included Mahjong.
I tried all the solutions offered.
KVM was still impossible because even though there is a slightly obscure GL driver, the win7 support is experiemental, listed as buggy, and not updated in many years, nor talked about much (never a good sign). I decided not to fight with it to get it installed unless the other options were exhausted.
So I tried the VirtualBox with the enable-3d option. Ya, so after realizing I needed to up the video-ram option, I was able to make a vm and install win7, install the guest programs, and...
boom
Mahjong just works, doesn't complain about no 3d, and runs basically as fast and pretty as it did on the old win7 bare metal laptop did. ... with basically zero effort and work. Astounding.
Compare that to serious time wastage fighting with KVM/qemu and win7, during which I never got 3d working (with any avenue of attack), nor all the agent stuff working because of minimum windows version requirements and version mismatch hell when you try to go back to older agents.
I think it was Rob who suggested vbox, so thanks Rob!
At the beginning of all of this I read some simple advice that said VirtualBox should be used for Windows guests, and KVM for linux guests. But I wanted to be "extra FLOSSy" and try to use the not-non-free solution. Ya, so the moral of the story is, they're right, at least for obsolete Windows (which I know many people do require for legacy software).
Wife will be super happy!
MUUG for the win(7)! _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca