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Wine On Android Starts Allowing Windows Binaries On Android/ARM

Posted by timothy on from the it-should-be-called-bender dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Wine on Android is happening slowly but surely ... Wine is now in a state to be able to run your favorite Windows (x86) game on your Android-powered ARM device, assuming the game is Windows Solitaire. Wine has been making progress on Android to allow simple applications to run on Wine, but they have run into some challenges, as noted in the annual talk at FOSDEM."

27 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. STOP REDIRECTING DAMMIT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Dammit, Dice, I thought you said you heard us. I don't want to use beta, stop redirecting me there PLEASE. I didn't want to do the stupid boycott thing, but when I came into work this morning and found myself on Beta... well, I think I'll just leave.

    1. Re:STOP REDIRECTING DAMMIT by allo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Isn't it strange, that every anti-beta post is now modded -1, even when the majority of the users is against beta?
      And off-topic is wrong, anti-beta is on-topic, because this is a slashdot article, and it will be displayed in the beta website, if slashdot decides to abandon the classic one.

    2. Re:STOP REDIRECTING DAMMIT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The point is: Slashdot should stop the beta, the users will stop spamming. Sometimes you have to protest until something changes.

  2. Capt Keen by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 4, Funny

    Call me back when I ran run my Captain Keen from Floppies!

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    1. Re:Capt Keen by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's Commander Keen to you! (And, incidentally, on an Android device with USB OTG and a copy of DOSbox, you should be only a USB floppy drive away from doing that right now...)

    2. Re: Capt Keen by kav2k · · Score: 4, Informative

      Seems like it's not the case, and USB floppy drives work out of the box (though you need a powered hub): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    3. Re:Capt Keen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      After 24 years, poor Billy Blaze deserves a promotion by now!

    4. Re:Capt Keen by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      He said he wanted to run from floppies. Seems morally unsound to me; but I just do implementation...

  3. Video of talk is available: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://video.fosdem.org/2014/AW1120/Sunday/Wine_on_Android.webm

  4. Better than protest! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The interesting thing about this is that when using Beta, the default view is to show everything. So, if you are using Beta, these trollish anti-beta things are perfectly visible, while if you are on Classic they just get filtered out with the rest of the trolls. So, if you really like Classic and hate Beta, the best thing you can do is try to post an anti-beta, pro-classic threat to leave the site as first post instead of Frosty Piss or whatever. That way, if any advertisers to who Dice is trying to market its new shiny actually check out the site, they will see the user dissatisfaction with the design immediately. Then, in subsequent threads we can go on having our usual geeky conversations in Classic.

  5. ARM executables? by supersat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What about ARM executables? Windows RT ships with most of the Windows utilities ported to ARM, as well as Office and .NET.

    1. Re:ARM executables? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes, It works! (TM)
      Running win8 ARM PEs also works.

    2. Re:ARM executables? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Windows RT ships with most of the Windows utilities ported to ARM, as well as Office and .NET.

      Who cares?

      For every crappy half-arsed app on RT, there's a thousand better naive Android apps.

    3. Re:ARM executables? by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Personally, I think that Windows could make really good inroads into the tablet market if they provided some kind of compatibility layer to run Android apps. Since they're using ARM on their Surface tablet, IT wouldn't even require actual emulation to get Android apps running on Windows RT. As an owner of the Surface 2, I have to say that the only real problem I have with it is the lack of apps, and providing the ability to run Android apps would make it probably the best tablet out there (even though I'm already convinced it is).

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    4. Re:ARM executables? by 0123456 · · Score: 2

      Don't you, like, buy an operating system to run apps?

      Why would you buy a Windows tablet if you're just going to run Android apps?

    5. Re:ARM executables? by CastrTroy · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's not really so simple. With tablets you don't buy an operating system. You buy the whole experience. You can't buy a tablet and then choose an operating system after the fact. I chose the Surface over other tablet options because of 2 main reasons.

      1) Ability to plug in an SD card for expandable storage.
      2) Reasonable expectation that I'll get OS updates.

      The first reason excludes all Apple tablets as well as many Android tablets. The second excludes most Android devices. Sure you may get updates with Android devices, but it's kind of a gamble.

      Apps was really secondary. Mostly with apps, I looked at whether or not there were enough apps to enjoy the device. I don't care if there's ten thousand, or a million, or a billion, because in reality I won't install more than a few hundred apps (and most likely a lot less). As long as it has a few fun games, the ability to browse web pages, play music, play movies, and the ability to get a little work done from time to time, it basically fits my needs. The browser on the Surface is actually quite good, and negates the need for many apps in the first place. There's no Youtube app, but the website works just fine. There is a Facebook apps, but it doesn't even need to be used unless you want background notifications, because the browser can access all of Facebook's functionality.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  6. N900 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This was already done on the N900 (ARM!) using qemu, and it even had acceptable performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3v4YC9RT-g

  7. increasingly inaccurate acronyms by nten · · Score: 3, Funny

    So now WINE *is* an emulator? Thats a tough acronym to sell, recursive or otherwise. I guess really the QEMU package is the emulator, but still.

    --
    refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
    1. Re:increasingly inaccurate acronyms by AdamColley · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wine Is Now Emulation

      Not so tough -.o

    2. Re:increasingly inaccurate acronyms by evanh · · Score: 2

      The point is Wine can't perform the emulation that is needed for x86 code to run on an ARM CPU. For that you actually need and emulator.

    3. Re:increasingly inaccurate acronyms by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 2

      Running wine with qemu is nothing new - ppc linux users were doing that a decade ago.

    4. Re:increasingly inaccurate acronyms by Wootery · · Score: 2

      Yes. This is exactly what evanh just said. Wine doesn't translate instruction-sets, it just makes available the Windows ABI. Therefore, if you want to run Linux+Wine on anything but x86/x86-64, you'll need hardware-emulation, which Wine itself doesn't provide.

    5. Re:increasingly inaccurate acronyms by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 2

      So now WINE *is* an emulator? Thats a tough acronym to sell, recursive or otherwise. I guess really the QEMU package is the emulator, but still.

      As the TP post was complaining about how we handle the acronym based on the mistaken premise that there was a "not" in there which originally there was not. I was only pointing out that plenty linux distros support different architecture which is equally not supported.

      End of

      --

      Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

  8. how pathetic is it... by Karmashock · · Score: 3, Interesting

    that it takes the linux open source community to port windows programs to smart phones.

    We've been asking for this from MS for EVER. MS keeps worrying about how to win the smartphone war...

    They're morons. They'd win instantly if they allowed windows apps to run on the windows phones. Yes yes... there are problems. None of them are impossible to solve. Do it or pay someone to do it.

    --
    I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
    1. Re:how pathetic is it... by AC-x · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We've been asking for this from MS for EVER

      They just can't win can they?

      Everyone: We want the same apps on our phone and tablet as on our desktop!

      MS: Ok, with Windows 8 we'll created a unified UI and Dev experience so the same app can be released on all 3 platforms! Neat huh?

      Everyone: We don't want our PC to be like a phone, we hate Windows 8!

    2. Re:how pathetic is it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They could listen... Doing exactly the opposite of what people ask is not winning.

      Home owner: I want my house the same red color as my car.
      Painter (who apparently used to work for MS): Ok, I've painted your car white, so now your house has the exact same color as your car.
      Home owner: I don't want my car to look like my house, I hate white.

    3. Re:how pathetic is it... by Patch86 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Everyone: We want to be able to run the programmes that we use on our desktops on our phones too!

      MS: OK, with Windows 8 we'll turn your desktop into a MASSIVE PHONE. All your favourite desktop programmes will have to be extensively rewritten so that they can run halfway gracefully on your new MASSIVE PHONE desktop, and will be able to run on your actual phone or tablet too (as long as you buy the software twice, seeing as we're not implementing an ARM/x86 emulation layer at all). Neat, huh?

      Everyone: [despair]

      Make sense?