My Experience with Gamedrift

Now I've been a windows gamer for a while now, since directx came out and 3d games started getting even more popular.  Nowadays I find myself gravitating towards linux, for many various reasons, such as the philosophy behind a good GNU/Linux and just the raw speed of the entire system.  In fact by now I'm using Ubuntu about half the time and Windows XP the other half.  Now this brings in mind why do I use windows at all if I like Linux so much?  Well the answer is gaming.  Steam only works on windows (as far as I knew) but after looking through a bunch of sites and forums, with little help, i found www.steamgamesonlinux.com and it has helped me realize that I don't have to have Windows to play my favourite games (well maybe oblivion because framerate is low on wine right now.

But this whole thing brought me to another question: Are there any linux distrubutions that are designed for gaming in mind. Something of a bare bones Desktop with only crossover, wine, skype, chrome, and a CDN.  Well yes there is www.gamedrift.org will show you more about it.

This post though is dedicated to what I did to get gamedrift going on my computer, and being able to back track to windows should it turn out that Oblivion and Borderlands don't run on gamedrift as well as it did on windows.

Step 1: Driveimage XML (http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm) helped me back up my windows hard drive so I don't loose anything
Step 2: BartPE (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) so I can use DriveImage on this computer to get my windows hard drive back.  Downloading the DriveImage BartPE plugin (http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm) is a sub-step here.  And there's loads of places that will teach you how to make a BartPE and what  plugins to use, this is not the place.
Step 3: Download GameDrift Linux (http://gamedrift.org/)  It's a CD ISO file and I was out of CDs.  This explains steps 4 through 6
Step 4: Installed VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) Made a dummy machine so I can check out the BartPE I made, and verify that GameDrift downloaded from MegaUpload properly (first one didn't work)
Step 5: Used Startup Disk Creator (yes the Ubuntu tool) from within VBOX while booting the GameDrift ISO into live mode to make myself a real life USB installer.
Step 6: Ran BartPE ISO within VBOX.  I'm not going to chance all 40gigs of data to an untested CD image.
Step 7: Burn BartPE using gBurner (http://www.gburner.com/) in windows.  It small but powerful, and I love how fast it starts up.  It's almost worth the $30 for buying it, I just wish it did transcoding to DVD Video.
Step 8: Reboot
Step 9: install GameDrift
Step 10: enjoy!