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
VirtualBox is FLOSS no? GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).
It is by far my favourite desktop VM software. I don't know why it doesn't get more love.
John
On Fri, May 9, 2025 at 3:43 AM Trevor Cordes <trevor@tecnopolis.camailto:trevor@tecnopolis.ca> wrote: 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.camailto:roundtable@muug.ca To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.camailto:roundtable-leave@muug.ca
-- John Lange
_______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca
On 2025-05-09 John Lange wrote:
VirtualBox is FLOSS no? GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).
It is by far my favourite desktop VM software. I don't know why it doesn't get more love.
Hmm, my impression from doing a lot of both lately (without having much experience with either) is VB is "less FLOSSy". On Fedora all the kvm/qemu stuff is in Fedora core repos. All the VB stuff is in rpmfusion-free.
The fact it's in rpmfusion hints that it must be in some way non-redistributable like normal packages. The fact it's in the "free" side of the repo means it must still have an O/S license.
In addition, the addons extpack, which seems to pretty much be required for VB to be useful, is not "free as in freedom", only "free as in beer".
Plus, VB to VMware appears to be like Fedora is to RHEL. Or maybe even worse? Maybe like MySQL community to MySQL for-pay? There's probably better metaphors...
And VB is Oracle, which is a big behemoth private company. kvm/qemu just seems to be a typical O/S project.
However, that does explain why VB seems way "more polished" and "easier", as well as the much, much nicer Win(7) support.
One thing I really like is that VB seems to understand people will want to run old OS's/software with it for a long time to come. KVM clearly seems to be jumping on the "oh, your Windows is >1 version behind, screw you" bandwagon.
Disclaimer: VM stuff isn't my wheelhouse, so please correct anything above that is mistaken. _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list -- roundtable@muug.ca To unsubscribe send an email to roundtable-leave@muug.ca
-
John Lange -
Trevor Cordes