64 bit WIN version of KSP, LINUX(WIN 7 dual boot) or Virtual Linux(on WIN 7) ?

[dognosh]

Since I didn't spot a place to ask this, I will do it here.

I used to play in Beta many moons ago, and I came back nearly 2 weeks ago, as this is by far the most engaging game I have ever played !!!

I have WIN 7 with 16 Gig of RAM(and the rest of my spec is very good) but I soon run out of RAM in the 32 bit version and the game crashes

This is without even installing many of the mods I want ! (After loading my current add-ons, KSP is on about 3 Gig of used RAM, and it keeps climbing as I progress in game)

I am IT savvy(Software Engineer) so I learn fast. I have never used Linux(yes I know, the shame of it) but can learn quickly.

What is the most stable route :

64 bit WIN KSP (using the well known hacks on KSP forums) ?

A Linux install(and flavour please) for dual booting with WIN 7 ?

Or a virtual install of sorts in WIN 7 ? (virtual software ? and Linux flavour?)

thanks all

p.s. Are all Add-ons available in Linux ?

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p.p.s Clean and lone LINUX install is not an option , as I need WIN 7

[Ignath]

I would suggest using x64 Linux. I dual-boot Linux Mint w/Cinnamon Desktop and Win7 x64 myself but have heard many people having positive results with Ubuntu and many other distro's of Linux. Mint is pretty easy to set up and learn, I never used Linux until recently as well and had no issues installing or setting up my own personalized install.

All mods should be available for Linux, as they are platform-agnostic (work on Win, Linux and OS-X) as far as I'm aware.

Also, CKAN works on Linux as well (link in my Sig), so you have a mod manager available if you'd like it.

[dognosh]

Cheers Ignath, and yes , I deffo want CKAN

[steve_v]

Dual boot pretty much any Debain based distro (or Debian itself of course) should be fairly painless, so long as you're willing to learn a new OS If you don't like Debian, pretty much any modern distro should work just fine too.

It's really the only stable* 64bit route at the moment, though this may change with the move to Unity 5.

The Win64 hack works for some, not so much for others, and you will have to un-disable the mods that disable themselves on detecting it.

KSP in a VM will most likely suck pretty hard performance wise, unless you have a second graphics card and feel like experimenting with PCI passthrough to give the VM a real GPU to work with. I haven't tried this, but what I can say is that you'll get something like 1-2 FPS without it.

All addons are available on GNU/Linux, including those that are disabled on the Windows x64 hack.

*It's rock solid for me at ~7-8GB, but there are scattered reports of crashing at 16GB... not sure what's going on here, but you probably won't hit that limit anyway

Edited July 17, 2015 by steve_v

[haltux]

If you go the Linux way, you should check first that your Graphic Card has a proper OpenGL Linux driver. Last time I checked, with an ATI card you could forget it (it was supposed to work but practically was a nightmare).

I am curious, what mods are you using? I am using the Win 32 bits version as most player and never I have never had any issue, including with RSS.

[Hannu]

I use dual boot system with Linux Mint and Windows 7. I installed Linux mainly for KSP. I do not know if Mint is the best Linux but at least it is very stable (both OS and KSP) and relatively easy to install.

Nobody else can say how 64 bit windows version works in your computer. Somebody says that it is good and stable and somebody can not use it at all. Most people are somewhere between extremes. I tried when it came first time but changed to 32 bit after couple of days, many crashes and tens of annoying little bugs. Test it if you like to use Windows software at the same time. Otherwise I recommend Linux.

[dognosh]

Again thanks all

If you go the Linux way, you should check first that your Graphic Card has a proper OpenGL Linux driver. Last time I checked, with an ATI card you could forget it (it was supposed to work but practically was a nightmare).

I am curious, what mods are you using? I am using the Win 32 bits version as most player and never I have never had any issue, including with RSS.

WIN 7 Pro 64 bit , i7-3770K , 16 Gig RAM , 2 X 780Ti in SLI & Triple screen.

oooh, very important question, will Linux support triple screen as I love it in KSP ?

My mods :

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And I haven't even installed NEAR ,FAR or KW , or SpaceY or outer planets or REAL stuff !!!

(which I would love to try)

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And I force KSP in to OpenGL or DX11(via 2 shortcuts) just to see which performs better, jury still out.

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Dual boot pretty much any Debain based distro (or Debian itself of course) should be fairly painless, so long as you're willing to learn a new OS If you don't like Debian, pretty much any modern distro should work just fine too.

It's really the only stable* 64bit route at the moment, though this may change with the move to Unity 5.

The Win64 hack works for some, not so much for others, and you will have to un-disable the mods that disable themselves on detecting it.

KSP in a VM will most likely suck pretty hard performance wise, unless you have a second graphics card and feel like experimenting with PCI passthrough to give the VM a real GPU to work with. I haven't tried this, but what I can say is that you'll get something like 1-2 FPS without it.

All addons are available on GNU/Linux, including those that are disabled on the Windows x64 hack.

*It's rock solid for me at ~7-8GB, but there are scattered reports of crashing at 16GB... not sure what's going on here, but you probably won't hit that limit anyway

You make good sense here, like the others who replied

OK , LINUX dual boot it is.

Now, which one ? which GUI for it ? (or it comes with one these days ? )

so far we have MINT & DEBIAN ?

[steve_v]

Ahh, multi monitor, multi gpu... The NVIDIA driver is pretty slick these days, and that kind of setup is apparently supported... but I no longer have a second GPU to confirm I have heard reports that it's not so easy to do triple monitor due to the not-really-linux-native nature of Unity so YMMV.

Using SLI for performance on GNU/Linux is a bust though, the only engine with proper support IDTech4.

[dognosh]

Ahh, multi monitor, multi gpu... The NVIDIA driver is pretty slick these days, and that kind of setup is apparently supported... but I no longer have a second GPU to confirm I have heard reports that it's not so easy to do triple monitor due to the not-really-linux-native nature of Unity so YMMV.

Using SLI for performance on GNU/Linux is a bust though, the only engine with proper support IDTech4.

SO I am ok with DOOM 3 ? lol

[selfish_meme]

Ahh, multi monitor, multi gpu... The NVIDIA driver is pretty slick these days, and that kind of setup is apparently supported... but I no longer have a second GPU to confirm I have heard reports that it's not so easy to do triple monitor due to the not-really-linux-native nature of Unity so YMMV.

Using SLI for performance on GNU/Linux is a bust though, the only engine with proper support IDTech4.

Nvidia SLI does not need game support, and Linux nvidia can do it, i ran an SLI setup for many years.

[steve_v]

Now, which one ? which GUI for it ? (or it comes with one these days ? )

so far we have MINT & DEBIAN ?

This is a very open ended question, there are literally hundreds of distributions out there aimed at various use cases. Probably 100+ "desktop" distros alone.

Add in the choice of desktop environment / UI and that's a question I'm not sure I can answer.

I like Debain. Mint is very close to Debian. I also like Arch. I started out with Slackware. Meh, try 'em out till you find out what you like, it's called... distro hopping

AFAIK Ubuntu has the biggest userbase, but Debian's community tends to be more technical (if a little less welcoming at times) Slackware is closer to old-school *nix or BSD in some respects, Arch is right on the bleeding edge with it's rolling release model, Gentoo lets you compile everything exactly how you want it. The list goes on.

If I had to pick one, I'd say Debian. But only because that's what I'm using at this point in time and I'm more familiar with it than, say, Fedora. Not that there's anything wrong with that choice either.

[radonek]

oooh, very important question, will Linux support triple screen as I love it in KSP ?

I use triplescreen with intel card and dualscreen with nvidia, works great. Actually, it works way better then win7 for me. Windows can turn display on and off, and thats about it. Can't enforce or remember window placement, size, state, screen or anything. Linux window managers are highly configurable and can make multiscreen not only working, but comfortable and useful.

[steve_v]

Nvidia SLI does not need game support, and Linux nvidia can do it, i ran an SLI setup for many years.

My experience would differ... at least for modern games. It seems like it works but the performance doesn't scale anything like it should. But if you've got some tricks to getting say, metro 2033 to work properly with NVIDIA SLI on Linux I'm all ears

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I use triplescreen with intel card and dualscreen with nvidia, works great. Actually, it works way better then win7 for me. Windows can turn display on and off, and thats about it. Can't enforce or remember window placement, size, state, screen or anything. Linux window managers are highly configurable and can make multiscreen not only working, but comfortable and useful.

https://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/thumb/9/9b/KWin_Settings_Geometry.png/624px-KWin_Settings_Geometry.png

And here is why I love KDE. Many, many knobs. I suggested this solution a while back, but can't test it myself - so it's good to hear that it works. Edited July 17, 2015 by steve_v

[Tynrael]

As someone completely new to Linux my experience with Mint was not so bad. ~5minutes to format the install on a USB, ~15minutes to install and get to desktop, ~20minutes to figure out how to get the real Nvidia drivers setup from the Terminal... quick install of Steam/KSP and then setting it to load the x64 version.

Trying to get the extra buttons on my mouse to play nice or alternate sound drivers however was a battle I lost. I found the Linux version used significantly more RAM than my DirectX version in Windows- but it sounds like you have plenty.

[Guest]

Dual boot linux x64.

Steam wants Ubuntu, but I made it run under Mageia 5 x64. Steam is 32bit, and wants 32bit libraries, including those from video drivers.

If you don't have any linux distro preferences (yet), just use Ubuntu.

[dognosh]

Thanks again. In the absence of more personal experiences from yourselves I so far have Debian, Ubuntu & Mint. I have lots of catching up to do before I install anything

[soulsource]

If you go the Linux way, you should check first that your Graphic Card has a proper OpenGL Linux driver. Last time I checked, with an ATI card you could forget it (it was supposed to work but practically was a nightmare).

AMD is only a nightmare, if one is masochistic enough to bother with the proprietary drivers. The open source drivers work out of the box on most Linux distributions. The only exception I know of is Debian, which doesn't install the required firmware files by default, as they are in the non-free repository, and has a crash issue with recent AMD cards (for which a one-line workaround exists, but one needs to know how to compile software to apply it).

Thanks again. In the absence of more personal experiences from yourselves I so far have Debian, Ubuntu & Mint. I have lots of catching up to do before I install anything

For users who have some computer experience but are new to Linux I'd recommend Debian, as it is the one of these three, for which an actual installation manual that deserves the name exists. It might be slightly more difficult to set up and configure than Ubuntu or Mint, but as you are a software engineer, I think you'll appreciate the manual which, while being written for absolute beginners, includes a lot of useful background information (see also the appendices), and you'll probably also like the more powerful installer of Debian.

Of course there's also an installation manual for Ubuntu, but that's just a copy of the Debian manual, with the name Debian replaced by Ubuntu, and therefore is rather useless, as Ubuntu no longer uses the Debian installer...

After installation, just be sure to do things the Linux way. The biggest difference between Windows and Linux is the installation of software. Let the package manager (Synaptic or Muon (or Software Center on Ubuntu, but the only purpose of Software Center is downloading Synaptic...) are GUI frontends, apt-get or aptitude are command line frontends) do software downloads and installation for you whenever possible. This not only gives you automatic updates, it also gives you a sane way to uninstall stuff, as on Linux nearly all programs get installed into the same folders (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard). The graphics drivers are no exception to this rule (trust me, updating or uninstalling them is an ugly mess if you don't use the package manager). Also, Steam is available through official repositories (non-free (the non-free means: free as in free beer, but not free as in free speech) on Debian, or multiverse on Ubuntu). If you bought KSP from the store or GoG, you'll have to make an exception though, and download it directly from the website...

Ah, and don't forget to read the Linux Thread. Especially important: If your locale uses another character as the period as decimal separator, read this before you first attempt to launch KSP (or any other Unity game...), as otherwise your settings file will get corrupted and all kinds of strange things can happen ingame...

[dognosh]

+1 rep

Cheers soulsource, your post is the one I will come to if I install Linux

p.s. you read manuals ?

[soulsource]

Of course, as reading manuals is half the deal with Linux . Quite often when asking questions online, the answers will typically start with "rtfm", just before they give you the answer you are looking for.

One of the most important command line utilities on Linux is the "man" command, which is used to display manuals for other commands (actually the short summary of the complete manuals, which are either available through the "info" command or as text/html/pdf files in the /usr/share/doc folder). There are of course also manpages online, so one doesn't need to open a terminal every time one wants to look up something. Another useful command line tool is "apropos", which will search through installed manuals in order to help you find out how a command you are looking for is called.

[steve_v]

@soulsource: Have some rep from me too. Excellent advice. So much so that I have nothing more to add.

[micha]

OK , LINUX dual boot it is.

Now, which one ? which GUI for it ? (or it comes with one these days ? )

so far we have MINT & DEBIAN ?

I'd advise against the current Gnome (which is default on a lot of distros) - it sucks lots of resources and is not all that intuitive for a Windows user (that said, some people love it). Ubuntu's own take of this is called Unity.

If you're mainly running Linux for KSP, try one of the traditional lightweight GUI's such as XFCE or LXDE which still maintain the standard desktop metaphor.

If you want traditional Gnome, try Cinnamon (I think it's the default on Linux Mint) or MATE; the former is based on Gnome3 while retaining the Gnome2 look-and-feel, while the latter is a port of Gnome2. Again, you get a fairly traditional desktop out of this.

KDE is pretty good these days (I use it presently) and gives you a full-featured desktop similar to Windows.

If you want ultra-lightweight try WindowMaker and similar, but be prepared for a rather different interface.

Here's an overview of some of the most popular choices these days:

http://www.howtogeek.com/163154/linux-users-have-a-choice-8-linux-desktop-environments/

Regardless of which GUI you choose, you can always mix-and-match applications, although some applications will pull in lots of dependencies if they were written for a different desktop.

[dognosh]

+1 rep, cheers micha

I like KDE and Mint after going to your link. There is also a GUI that is called Unity, is it anything to do with KSP and its link to Unity ? (you know, the WIN 64 bit hack)

[Esme]

Dognosh, no it;s nothing to do with the Unity game engine. And if you should find that KDE is hogging more resources than you'd like, try Xfce as a desktop - it's a pleasant lightweight old-school GUI. I;lve heard good things of LXDE too, although I haven;t tried it myself.

[JSD]

Whatever Linux version you take, it doesn't really matter. Linux has a long, and deep learning curve. I use Linux for a couple of years now. Mostly in server related issue's. But I have dealt with the desktop version as well. Linux is amazing! With servers. It's freaking stable. I takes a lot of work (mostly with commands) to set it all up. It is kind of nerd stuff. Linux can be extremely complex, but if you do it all right.. Linux is your best friend. Besides that, unless you want to challenge yourself, keep it to Windows. Linux is a amazing OS, but is isn't really user friendly. For normal day uses, you have to do, so much trouble. Windows works with point and click. You can control almost anything. You can delete almost anything. Even beyond the point of no return. Windows let you delete system parts. Kinda bad to be honest. But, Linux works the other way around. For a simple delete you sometimes need to do a whole lot of unnecessary stuff. Just to be "sure and secure". It's so not user friendly.. Servers NEED to be stable. Server need to work. Linux does that. But for everyday use? I keep using Windows, with all the problems it has. It's just is SO much easier. Linux is a pain in the ass sometimes. That's why most of the user have a duel boot instead of a Linux only system. Windows is still the biggest player for a reason. It's too damn easy to use. Just download Ubuntu and start playing with it. Cool thing about Linux is, that most versions, (at least Ubuntu etc) has a "live" function. You can try the Linux version from the disk, instead of installing it right away. Try it, and find out. But for KSP only? Why on earth would you install a Linux, JUST for KSP? Why is that 64 bit Windows version of KSP still not working? That's the million dollar question..

[dognosh]

cheers all

JSD , yes only for KSP and nothing else. I will dual boot WIN 7 & Linux x64 on my gaming rig. This game is unplayable with lots of mod in 32 bit mode as I run out of memory within an hour of running KSP.

So either KSP has a huge(or many small) memory leak(s) , or the add-ons are to blame(can't see how , as trash collection and memory re-allocation should have nothing to do with mods and only internal to KSP)

I will read up on Linux but will wait for a month or 3 and see if something regarding KSP 64 bit(in WIN) turns up...