The changing Fedora

[Ian Malone]

On 22 January 2013 15:02, Greg Woods <woods at ucar.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-01-22 at 12:12 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:
>>
>
>> one reason more to have one priamry OS and use virtualization
>> for anything else
>
> There are some cases where this doesn't work. One I know of is
> commercial games under Windows. Some of them just do not work when
> Windows is running in a VM.
>
> I have been told (and I don't know if it's true but it makes sense) that
> this is because of copy protection. The game CD has some stuff written
> beyond the "end" of the disc. Low-level system calls can read this, but
> a normal user space disc copy doesn't, so the software can tell when it
> loads whether or not this is the original CD or a copy. Since the
> hypervisor doesn't implement reading beyond the end of the disc, the
> games won't load even with the original CD when running in a VM.
>
> As I said, I don't know if this explanation is correct, but I do know
> that some of my games will not load when running in a VM, so I have to
> have a native Windows boot.
>

One of a number of tricks that publishers have tried to use (another
favourite is detecting debuggers, which often refuses to work with
Wine). Of course the game ends up being cracked anyway and people with
legitimate copies end up looking for cracks to work around problems
with the copy protection...
Actually the grub2 install thing should not affect dual-booting
windows. From what I understand (I've never used this setup myself)
some people multi-boot linux versions by having separate /boot and a
partition-installed grub for each one, which the device-installed grub
chooses. You could potentially multiboot linuxes by sharing the /boot
and having all the entries in one grub.conf, but I think it might be
tricky to correctly handle updates. Fortunately there are fewer issues
running linux in a VM, unless the machine has limited resources.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk