Windows Software Coming To Android Via Wine 107
A reader sends this quote from ZDNet:
"Software that allows Windows apps to run on Android devices was demoed at the Fosdem 2013 open source conference this weekend. The demo by Alexandre Julliard, one of the original developers of Wine, showed Wine running on an emulated Android environment. Phoronix reports the performance of Wine on Android to be 'horrendously slow' but says these problems were attributed to it running on an emulated environment rather than a native Android OS. ... The makers claim it bypasses many performance and memory penalties of other methods for simulating computing environments, such as running virtual machines, by translating Windows API calls into POSIX calls on the fly. The Android OS predominantly runs on ARM-based devices today, and a separate demo at the Fosdem conference showed Wine running on ARM-based hardware. There was no news on when support for ARM-based devices or Android will be added to a publicly available Wine release."
Any practical use? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yo Dawg (Score:5, Interesting)
Back before there were native Sinclair Spectrum emulators for unix, I used to run a DOS Spectrum emulator in a PC emulator on a Sparc. Worked OK, there were enough extra CPU cycles to handle all the translation from Z80 to 8086 to Sparc and still play the games at full speed.
Re:TL;DR (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably not native binaries on ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer - I haven't been actively involved in Wine development for quite a few years, but I used to be. Someone else will probably chime in and either correct me or give more details.
Running Wine on ARM probably won't run native Windows binaries. That means you're not going to be running MS Office on your S3 any time soon. To make it really work you'll likely have to specifically recompile the Windows app using Wine in the form of Winelib or do some kind of magic like qemu to get the big-endian / little-endian differences solved. That's on ARM though.
With Intel pushing their Atom platform, all of this would probably work out of the box, and it would probably actually work pretty good. Running the latest version of Photoshop or playing Diablo III might be a stretch on that platform, but realistically you could probably run a version of MS Office or enjoy tons of classic games.
Processor speed will be an issue - Wine has decent performance, but there's a lot of libraries that need to be loaded to make even a simple Windows app run. The latest quad core processors in the mobile world might be enough.
But why? (Score:4, Interesting)
WINE is so hit or miss, and I don't think there is any MS-Windows app that would actually work in WINE that I would want to run on Android, anyway.
I would much rather have:
* OpenOffice/LibreOffice for Android. Far better chance of that happening (and actually working).
* A *FULL* X11 implementation for Android, bringing all (or at least many of) the Linux desktop apps over. (Again, far better chance than getting WINE working on Android with any reasonable performance or stability).
* Android apps running native (or at least semi-native) under a Linux desktop. (Really, this should be pretty darn easy, in theory anyway)
Re:TL;DR (Score:5, Interesting)
Like that now 6 month old 10 inch 1980x1200 acer tablet? Or that new Asus with 1980x1200, or the old Asus with 1280x800, or the rumored new Samsung tablet coming out with 2560x1600? or that 5.3" galaxy note with 1280x800, the new Galaxy S4 with 1920x1080?
Re:Ah, more viruses (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a link to start.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/24/1759213/now-linux-can-get-viruses-via-wine [slashdot.org]