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If you’ve ever messed around with Linux, you’re probably familiar with a little program called “Wine,” WINdows Emulator/Wine Is Not an Emulator. With its magic, you can run Windows applications on your Linux box, and soon, Wine could be running them on your Android phone as well.
Alexandre Julliard, the original developer behind Wine, has now shown off a preliminary build of Wine for Android this Sunday just gone in Brussels. So far, the Android version of the emulator has been subpar; Phoronix went so far as to describe the demo’s performance as “horrendously slow,” but demo was run on an emulated Android device. Theoretically the performance should be much better on an actual phone or tablet, and after it’s had a bit more development time.
All in all, a workable version of Wine for Android is still a long way off, but this proves that if nothing else it’s at least possible, and by extension, so is running real Windows programs on your phone, so long as your phone is powerful enough. It’s going to be a long time before any of this comes to fruition, but if and when it finally does, it’s going to be wild. [Phoronix via The Next Web]
Image by umbertoleporini/Shutterstock
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I would have thought this would be more interesting for android tablets?
You want to run x86 applications on an Arm processor under emulation.* So if what you’re looking for is glacier-paced responsiveness and no driver compatibility, this would be what you’re looking for…
(*and yes, I know, the WINE crowd say “it’s not an emulator”, but given that windows x86 apps aren’t compiled for ARM processors, it’s pretty hard to see how there could be no emulation going on in this particular case…)
WINE isn’t doing the x86 emulation, you need an emulator like BOCHS to do that.
Also surely with windows RT there are going to be an increasing number of windows applications built for ARM architectures?
@ Spazturtle – Sure – I didn’t mean to suggest that WINE would have to do the emulation – just that there would need to be some emulation.
@ jtanz0 – Yeah, that’s why I specified x86 apps. (Win 8 “Metro” apps will run on either x86 or Arm)
Fair enough, guess I didn’t read your post properly, apologies for that! My point was I guess there will be more windows apps written for ARM or at least compiled for ARM with Win RT around?
No, metro apps aren’t built for ARM or x86 they are built to work on a layer, like how flash apps don’t care or know about what architecture they are running on.
I’ve never used an RT system but aren’t there desktop i.e. non metro apps for it like Office that are built for ARM?
@ jtanz0 – yeah, Office for ARM exists, but it had to be totally re-compiled. Doing this for most Win x86 apps to get them to run on Android is a huge task or the publisher & wouldn’t be cost-effective.
@ Spazturtle – To be fair, I didn’t say Metro apps were built for ARM (or x86) – I just said they would work on either. The point is that Metro apps could be made to work on ARM without the need for emulation, whereas Windows desktop apps would need some emulation to get them to work on ARM.
Have you heard of BOCHS?
Even MS thinks this is a bad idea, hence Metro