This:

Thanks to Peturrr’s excellent HOWTO, I’m running VMWare Server under Ubuntu, and it works very well. I’ve installed XP so that I can do a few Windows-specific things, like open Powerpoint documents that don’t play nice with OpenOffice, use etax, and such. Of course, I got bored, and decided to experiment a little.

As you can see from the screenshot, that is Valve’s TFC running in XP, inside of the VMWare Server Monitor. It runs quite well in 1024×768; my Athlon64 3400+ is able to push out around 25-35fps; though there is one problem. Unfortunately mouse input is somehow garbled by VMWare server, such that moving the mouse on my mousepad as little as 1-2 millimetres results in several 360-degree turns and random pitching from the player’s FOV in the game. Turning the sensitivity to minimum (1.0) in TFC didn’t help one iota; no doubt it’s a VMWare-combined-with-XP-combined-with-software-rendering-of-old-games issue.

Installing Linux has probably been the best thing I have done on my computer in a while; I was getting bored with the same-old, same-old that I used to do within Windows: chat, e-mail, internet forums, music, game. Now, I do all those things, and more: tinker, compile, learn, tweak, and get frustrated (sometimes) — but, it makes the experience all the more authentic, and worth my time. Linux is fun, believe it or not. :-)

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas how can fix the strange mouse issues, leave a comment. I really would like to play TFC! :-)