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If you're so afraid about losing your Windows Build, isn't it a solution to stick with Linux and run a VM with the needed Windows build? Linux will take care of all the drivers for your ever-upgrading hardware, while Windows on the VM should remain stable and not care about the hardware, since it's linked to it through Linux drivers anyway. If you only need Windows for offline rendering and can "drag and drop" content you downloaded through Linux, I would think it would work.
Of course if DAZ decides to stop supporting Windows 7 or 10 or whatever version you'll run, you're stuck with the older version. But at least you won't lose things overnight through updates. Especially since if the VM is technically "offline", while your main Linux machine is "online" no updates can be installed on the VM.
Does DAZ Studio, Bryce, (and all my other software for which there isn't a Linux replacement) actually run 100% under Linux? I seem to hear lots of reports of it not completely or correctly working, and haven't tried it for this reason. If it's known to work with zero problems, I'd like to look into this option.
DAZ runs under wine with some bugs. There's a thread on how to install it "quasi-natively" on Linux around somewhere, where different people report different results. Mostly it runs, but the sliders (on morphs or movement) are buggy (releases with the mouse pressed), CMS service is hard to get running and I don't remember if it runs Iray on GPU. It's doable, but when I tried to switch, working with one of AeveNainen dresses was a nightmare due to the buggy sliders.
But I didn't mean to let them run under Linux. What I meant was to setup a Virtual Machine (which is like having a fake Windows running in a separate environment, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine). If you install Windows 7 on it, it will most certainly run DAZ, Bryce and other things that run on Windows 7.
I don't have the link to hand, but it is possible to download an .iso from Microsoft with the correct installation - that's what i did to upgrade from 7, and i did it again (to get the service packs) before doing a reinstall in February.
Here is the link to download Win 10 creators iso. And to create installation media.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
I had to do this when I upgraded my computer to a Ryzen 5 1600. It was necessary so I could re-activate my Win 10 Pro.
..the issue with running a VM is resource location.
If you are running a VM, the resources (CPU and memory) are shared and must be allocated between the two OS's being run. For example, if I had a Linux system with W7 on a VM I would have to allocate say 3 GB of the system's total memory (12 GB) to the Linux OS (as I have a tri channel system) and the other 9 to W7 to avoid any performance loss. Of course this would mean less memory for working in Daz on W7 than I currently have.
On a dual boot system you only have one OS running at a time so all the system's resources are dedicated to it. The downside is you would have to reboot the system to switch between OS's. So you could download your newly purchased content and any programme updates manually while in Linux, then after rebooting to W7, move the files to the DIM folder in W7 and install in offline mode. Not sure how this would work for betas as I don't believe the DIM works in LInux.
Of course this still doesn't address the fact the new CPUs will not support driver updates for anything before W10, though it will allow you to run online under the latest security measures in Linux after W10 support is dropped.
The advantage of VM would be indeed that - not being dependent on the drivers and hardware. Technically, as long as VM software supports the OS, one could use W7 years after all hardware drops support.
Yes, it's easier to run a dual boot, but only if you can use W7 with your newest hardware. Yes, VM will have to sacrifice some resources to run Linux that encompasses it. But not much, and it's better than not being able to render at all. With the amount of RAM one could buy for reasonable price, should one really worry that you need to reserve 3-4 gb to Linux (which could be less, since there are leightweight Linux versions like xfce Mint, which don't need a lot to run) if you own 32 gb? How big are your scenes that you can't fit them in the 28-29 gb that are left?
I tend to remember that DIM does work under wine. Maybe not the online functionality, but definitely by downloading manual archives and let DIM now where to pick them up to install.
...so what happens in the case of a system with 4 channel memory (4 x 8GB)? Does it default to dual or even single channel as physical memory resources need to be allocated for both the W7 VM and Linux base?
...while doing some research, came across this.
Now it is geared towards installing W7 on a system with the current generation Ryzen CPUs, however, Threadripper is also part of the "Ryzen family".
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11182/how-to-get-ryzen-working-on-windows-7-x64
Did some reading. Seems that when you set up a VM, you allocate a certain amount of RAM to it, that it is allowed to use, splitting it into two pieces: RAM for VM and RAM for Host. Both are mutually exclusive. For 64 bit systems your VM can use up to 64GB, for 32 bit systems it can use up to 8GB. And Ubuntu can run on 512 MB of RAM if you're not doing anything on it. Note: if you give your VM say 16GB, while it's running, even when it doesn't need those 16GB, the Host can't access those 16GB.
Couldn't find anything on dual channel ram, which suggests dual channeling/4 channeling is something that happens on a more general level, depending on how much RAM you need. Then it gets split in VM and Host RAM. But I'm not sure.
Another thing for DAZ Users (don't know anything about Carrara): if you're worried about not using all of your resources in one place during rendering, a solution could be to set up the scene in the VM, save it, then close the VM, open it up in DAZ wine installation and render it full on Linux. I believe CPU rendering is faster under Linux than Windows. Unfortunately I don't have a GPU to test if that works under wine as well.
...but that would mean allocating a significant amount of your system memory to Linux as well in order to hold the scene open during rendering even if you are rendering on the GPU. If you have say only 16 GB total it could pose performance issues both while working in the VM and rendering in Linux as you would have to do a 50/50 split.
Again I have scenes that exceed 8 GB when open in Daz. This would almost make it imperative to have at least 32 GB of memory if not 64 for optimal performance. The best I can get on my current system is 24 GB which would mean a 12 and 12 split which would be cutting it close.
No, that would not mean that. That would mean that during building of the scene in the VM you're using the 16GB for the VM and build your scene. Then you CLOSE the VM, which returns the 16GB to your Linux host, and open the scene in the Linux quasi-natively (wine is still kind of a hack, but it uses the same memory Linux does, unlike VM) and render it using all of your RAM allocated to the host.
The split in RAM only occurs when the VM is running. Since saving the file to the harddrive allows you to re-open it through the Linux version of DAZ with the VM closed, you can keep your 16GB allocated to Linux during rendering.
...OK been reading up on this and it is a fairly confusing as I never set up a networked system or VM, just a dual boot.
Of course if I am rendering on a GPU in Iray, would I even need to switch over?
My bigger concern would be rendering in Vue and Carrara, neither of which have any support in Linux.
I use VM's all of the time in Linux. You must be sure that the VM you choose will run DS correctly. For instance, VirtualBox and DS do not like each other more times than not (OpenGL issues), while VMWare works pretty well. Using Xen and others can get pretty harrowing with the testing between versions of DS and the VMs.
Kendall
Rendering on a GPU where? On wine DAZ installation? Or windows in your dual boot? Because if the first, that one can get frustrating when setting up scenes due to the buggy sliders. Rendering is just one button, which works. Setting up scenes is a lot of sliders when using morphs and such. That's why I proposed to set up the scene in the VM and then render out in Linux.
As to never setting it up: just try it. VM is a software like any other. Download something (as Kendall suggests VMWare), try to install windows see what happens. It's not like it's going to blow up your computer if you do that. Worst case scenario it won't work and you'd have to uninstall it.
...rendering in the W7 VM.
You can make a backup of W10 iso image; use the tool that ms provide.
How does activation work? Is it possible to somehow activate it entirely offline through the PC you downloaded it on rather than the actual PC it is installed on, or do you connect to install?
Do you know if that ISO is constantly upgraded with the various service releases, or is just the original base version, or something else?
For a reference point, what flavor of Linux have you used VMWare with that you were happy with?
I'm not sure how offline activation is handled, but for online once the PC is activated Micorsoft will (in theory) remember it so you will simply need tor einstall the sfotware - I would hope for offline you'd simple need to exchange some kind of key/response though I don't know.
I've used VMWare since the first release in 1999 on a number of Linux Distros. Lately, though, I've been using VirtualBox more for things and reserving my paid VMWare licenses for things that VirtualBox has issues with. For the last few years I've concentrated my Linux distro's to Fedora and CentOS since these are the only two that most commercial packages will work under (and RHEL/CentOS is the only one certified to run my teslas with). I still have an Ubuntu install somewhere but TBH I've not used it in some time and was never happy enough with it to bother installing any VM's of any sort (I didn't like Canonical's idea of UI design). In years past I had lots of SuSE installs that I used VMWare under, but SuSE has become a small bit player.
Kendall
The "Workstation" license is about $150 per seat (physical machine) for VMWare, the "Workstation Pro" is $250 per seat. VirtualBox is free.
Kendall
They use to update the ISOs whenever a major update is being released (I'd suppose that the latest Creator's Update counts a major update).
"An entire generation of PCs, most only three or four years old, are now unable to receive new feature updates to Windows 10. But Microsoft has created an exception for those devices, allowing them to continue receiving security updates for five additional years."
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-blocks-windows-10-creators-update-on-some-pcs/
Be aware of that GPU support is usually rather rudimentary in Virtual Machines. I check them from time to time, but last time I checked, none was really useful when it comes to GPU demanding stuff.
I'd rather go the way and patch Win7 with that unofficial patch, to give it back what Microsoft took away - solely for the reason to push their Win10.
If that does not work, I'm out of Windows once and for all, because Win10 is a complete no-go to me.
Microsoft really has gone crazy...
Wow, how generous of Microsoft... :-D
In what way is it an issue, or can you point me at any specifica articles I should research?
VMWare fully supports access to the GPU. It is well documented on their site and in the documentation. nVidia themselves tout it: http://www.nvidia.com/object/dedicated-gpus.html
Kendall
But how about performance? Whenever I gave it a try, it "worked", but it was far away from running at an acceptable speed. For games, that is, like Fallout 4 or whatever.
As said, I didn't try it in the last months, but before that, yes, I could access the GPU but it was so damn slow.
As I don't do NVidia, so not sure if that, what NVidia announced, applies to me. But I think I should give it another try. One day it will work, I'm sure. :)
It might be issue if you expect the same performance as when running things natively. There is no such thing as research, but install a VM, install a GPU demanding app and try for yourself. You judge if it's an issue for you, I just wanted to give a heads up that it might not be as performant as you might think. But again, that might have changed in the last months and it also might depend on what you exactly want to do. Games did not work very well for me, did not try rendering.