Windows Software Coming To Android Via Wine

SternisheFan 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."

Comments

TL;DR

[YodasEvilTwin]

Some guy speculates that horrendously slow Wine on Android might allow you to use all 3 WinRT apps that don't have Android versions.

Re:TL;DR

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Emulating W9x under qemu is tolerably fast but running even something like TinyXP not so much-- the latter boots in about 5 minutes. The main problem though, is screen resolution. At minimum you need a screen capable of 800x600 (1024x768 really), and that doesn't count the real estate needed for the onscreen keyboard most users will be employing. I have no doubt the wine devs can make this work, but people without sooper-dooper high-res displays on their Android gadgets will be disappointed.

Re:TL;DR

[Curate]

The article is about WINE. WINE doesn't allow you to run WinRT apps. It allows you to run Win32 apps (which is quite a large catalog... but then your joke wouldn't work so well). However WINE still isn't compatible with every Win32 app. WINE is stuck at around the Windows 2000 era in terms of the APIs it offers, and even then it has numerous bugs and is relatively slow compared to Win32 on actual Windows. Still, although it sounds like I'm bashing WINE, I'm not; I'm just pointing out its limitations. WINE is still extremely useful for allowing quite a lot of software to run.

Re:TL;DR

[viperidaenz]

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:TL;DR

[powerlinekid]

The last time I ran WoW on Wine (around 2009) I had a higher FPS than Windows XP on the same machine.

Re:TL;DR

[smegfault]

All with pixel densities so high you're going to need a stylus and an on-screen magnifier just to double-click "My Computer".

But can it run Crysis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Crysis, all settings on full, on my Galaxy Note 2?

Re:But can it run Crysis?

[Nerdfest]

Yeah, you joke, but on my tiny little Sansa MP3 player running Linux/RockBox will run Doom, which used to take what was considered a pretty hefty PC to run. Just wait a bit.

Re:How about GNU software?

[Desler]

KDE is not a GNU project.

Re:Yo Dawg

[0123456]

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:Any practical use?

[PRMan]

I suppose if your phone has HDMI out and you own Bluetooth keyboard then you have a system for old PC games.

We already have DosBox for Android. I think they are talking about newer Windows games.

Probably not native binaries on ARM

[vinn]

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.

Not for users

[paugq]

I'd say Wine on Android is not intended for the end user but for developers. It's not about running Windows x86 applications on Android but about porting Windows applications to Andoroid:

1. As the developer of a Windows application in C/C++, I'll take the source code of my application
2. I'll take the Wine SDK for Android (which does not really exist yet, but wait and see, wait and see!)
3. I'll compile the source code of my application using the Wine SDK for Android. Briefly explained, what this does is use winelib + bionic instead of bionic only.
4. Result is I get a native Android application with a reduced effort

I will of course need to take care about the UI, especially if my application uses Metro-styled custom widgets: those do not fit in Android, but it's a matter of porting the UI of that speficic widget.

So in summary Wine on Android looks more like a cross-platform library (such as Qt or Mono) that implements the Win32 API instead of some other API.

Windows RT apps on Android? I doubt it. Both of them are supposed to be ARM but "ARM" does not really mean anything: there are far too many variations of ARM, even amongst same-generation processors.

Re:Ah, more viruses

[silviuc]

1) You clearly have no idea how Wine works
2) Please provide a list of incidents where Wine helped to proliferate Windows viruses on Linux or Unix machines

But why?

[markdavis]

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:Performance

[um... Lucas]

But aren't the early windows versions extremely tied to x86? So running them via wine on an android will involve emulating a pentium or 486 on the arm chip? That sounds like a recipe for horrendously slow to me...

Re:Performance

[DrXym]

An ARM processor emulating x86 is not going to be fast in any circumstances. The best you could hope for is that everything on the other side of the Win32 API is native so only the client code is emulated. It might suffice for older Windows apps or games.

Re:Ah, more viruses

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a link to start.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/24/1759213/now-linux-can-get-viruses-via-wine