Virtualisation

Can anbody tell me if its possible to get virtualised OpenGL graphics?

I have a new fast PC and have VMWare player installed, just to muck about with linux distro's. Everything works fine except VMWare Player only does D3D, not OpenGL, which is needed for (among other things) desktop effects.

Has anybody successfully got compiz working in a virtual environment, and if so, how'd you do it?

Google wasn't much help, although I did find a few examples of people who have managed to hack it together, but no clear instructions were given.

Painful and sluggish once you do finally hack it together. Virtualisation is not designed for fancy graphics performance.

Dual boot if you really wanna play with the compiz stuff, but just bear in mind it's purely eye-candy.

Hmm, so how do you get to working? or can you point me to a guide?

Previous to this I was dual booting on a core2 and it worked fine, but I have a better PC now so thought it woul'nt be so sluggish, especially with dedicating 4Gb ram and 4 cores solely to the VM. Long shot I know but it would be so much more convenient to be able to play around with linux but keep background apps working in windows (IM's, E-Mail, music etc) without having to duplicate all my programs over 2 OS's and having to reboot to switch between them all the time.

I never did it myself, but have played with a "working" setup. You'll note I placed quote marks around the word working there.

CPU power is irrelevant to D3D/OpenGL performance, since that shit is all handled on the video card. Virtualisation platforms do not and cannot give you direct access to the video card, hence it not working. All the guest OS sees of the video card is essentially a standard SVGA card.

You can "play around" with Linux just fine without the compiz eye candy on.

urgh.

People actually turn that shit on?

Update: Got it working totally painlessly
Virtualbox with a 12 Gig ubuntu 9.04 disk image, enabled 3d in vbox and I was able to boot into the ubuntu desktop with compiz etc running perfectly in under 15 minutes. I'm a little surprised it was that easy tbh, linux has come a long way!

Interesting. Not played with VirtualBox on Windows before, only on Ubuntu host.