Can WINE Be Ported to OS X?

geek asks: "With all the buzz around Darwin running XFree86, is there any hope of porting WINE to OS X? This could be a major factor for some people to move over to the platform. Since OS X has some FreeBSD roots my guess is it wouldn't be terribly hard to get WINE working under it. Now that Apple has an OS with UNIX in the floor boards the possibilities seem endless."

Comments

processor compatibility

[zarqman]

because wine is a reimplementation designed to support running native windows code and because os x is generally running powerpc machines, i would suspect the answer is no. 99.9% of windows programs are written for i386 and won't run on a powerpc, regardless of os. yes, you probably could get wine itself ported, but you'd have nothing to run on it. you would need a full emulator to deal with the i386 instructions -- a bit more than wine offers.

# cat .sig

What I want to know is...

[phr1]

Can WINE be ported to Win32?

BOCHS is probably more likely but...

[Time Kills]

WINE is not an emulator. This is actually important as WINE doesn't emulate for instance an Intel processor, its more what I'd call a mapping layer and a set of libraries to implement chunks of Windows. As mentioned, WINE could probably be ported but it wouldn't be helpful.

Something like BOCHS which actually emulates the processor as well is more likely. When OSX takes off I'd expect Connectix to be release a commercial Windows emulator though, just as they have for many years now.

WINE no, but WINE+Bochs?

[BRTB]

WINE by itself wouldn't help much on a PPC, since it's only acting as a translator for the Win16/32 API calls, not the x86 machine code. Now if you could graft bochs to it, so you'd emulate both the x86 processor and the Windows API's, it might work.

Of course at this point I'm thinking of the old saying about thing being easy to those who don't actually have to do it...
BRTB

Wine over VPC

[arete]

You can port wine. (as stated above)
You can't run i386 code on a PPC using only Wine (as stated above)

You can already run Connectix VPC on a PPC to emulate an i386 machine, and it works pretty impressively, imo.

The disadvantage of this (and bochs) is that it requires a copy (legal or otherwise, of course) of a windows operating system. And windows backdoors, etc, will still be present. Which is why running Wine OVER VPC might be a good idea... I thought I saw linux VPC the other day, although perhaps I was hallucinating. This would be a totally free legal solution... I only worry about the speed hits... I'd guess not too bad, though.

Re:Answering two questions

[kcarnold]

nope, sorry.

Re:Ummm... why?

[HerrNewton]

I agree with you in that eventually WINE or some WINE-like package will be the best solution. But for the immediate future, VPC will continue to be the best available option if not just becuase it's the only option.

"Relatively cheap"---relatively cheap compared to the cost of another computer, not to WINE. WINE doesn't factor into my cost comparissons as its not yet available for MacOS X or, to my knowledge, LinuxPPC. Of course when it becomes available and feature-equal to VPC it becomes the better option.

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