Hi All, I see that this topic had a small run three years ago, with little comment since,... but I have to ask. I am finally ready to build a solid sim-racing rig. I came to computers through Unix, many years ago, but of course, my gaming/sim experience for the last 25 years has been All Windows. I would love to free myself (to the extent possible) from yet another Windows machine, and have settled on Linux Mint 17 MATE 64bit as the likely alternative. I have installed it on an external "test" drive on my laptop, but have run into some serious problems trying to get rF2 to work on it in any form (BTW, Steam was a breeze to install/run). First, I attempted to get it running unde WINE, which appears that someone wrote the code to do so. I can see that rF1 has at some time worked, but only see rF2 "lite" with any positive indicators. Ultimately, I was unable to get WINE working properly anyway. I would pursue more expert help for that, if it weren't for the fact that Oracle VIRTUAL BOX, (with an active Windows installation / DirectX ) seems to be a more robust, and possibly cleaner solution (apparently WINE has VERY narrow requirements as to how the system libraries are used, and a heavy overhead). The problem now is that, so far, I only see the VIRTUAL BOX graphics driver listed, and am unable to install the driver for my nVidia M460 laptop graphics card, (which rF2 needs) as well as other installation issues that I will iron out later if this is even possible to do. I am willing to install a clean W7 distro under Virtual Box (and JUST for rF2!) if this can be made to work. Has anyone done this successfully, and could you direct me to any info that would help me make this personal dream work? Also, I have heard there have been potential problems with wheels/pedals under Linux, any idea if this problem been resolved? Of course, there is also no point in building a state-of- the-art system, if the Virtual Box overhead itself would significantly impact performance. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance for any positive advice. MarkP
I slightly misspoke here. What I meant to say is that there is would be no point in building a fast gaming PC running on Linux if the OS overhead emulating/running a Windows environment would cancel out any hardware performance increase. At that point, I will have a Windows boot-drive just for rF2, the likely outcome unless someone can shed any light on this. Thanks.
If I was you, I would install that win7 distro on a USB stick and just boot from it whenever you wish to run rfactor2; this would give you the full performance you are looking for, only take into account to choose a stick with average/good read-write speed byyyyyyyyyye
A good thought Thanks for that idea. The only problem that I see with it is that Linux drives are ext3 or ext4 format, which W7 doesn't seem to read. (Linux does recognize NTFS drives however). Since I'll need substantial space for rF2, anticipating many future tracks/mods, I might as well just put W7 on a bootable drive along with it, unless I can get it running in Linux. Thanks though.
Nah don't use virtual box to run a system like that. It will just end up a waste of time. Dual boot it, and have an entire drive for it in windows format with space for all your extra stuff. Keep it all windows to eliminate any complications. It is hard enough let alone adding in that complexity By all means use the capabilities to r/w that drive from linux to maintain and download (easier) if you will be in linux mostly, that'll certainly be more convenient. OpenGL? if only...
Will do datanode, thanks for saving me the effort. That does seem to be the best approach, for the foreseeable future.
This game runs on Wine, but without force feedback support in wheels. The best solution is a native port of the game Other solution is a "wine-packed-port" with his problems solved. There are a lot of companies that makes this kind of wineports (like Topware), is an unexpensive alternative.
While this is an option for DX9, I believe there are no good solutions for DX11 other than running natively.
