Hi all!
I was wondering if windows emulator like wine for linux could be
ported to maemo (n900). Im very new in the maemo world and to be honest in linux too, but the new n900 seems very promising and
think it'll be my next phone

Wine is not a windows emulator ("Wine" means 'Wine Is Not an Emulator" btw.)

In other words, it does not emulate an x86 Windows computer. It interfaces an x86 Windows application to an x86 Linux system by providing an interface to x86 Windows-type libraries and services.

The N900 uses an ARM CPU, not x86.

Windows 3.1

http://tabletblog.com/2008/07/dosbox...1-on-n810.html

I doubt you can do Win95, but worth a try.

N900 uses ARM architecture and that means any Windows emulation would be extremely slow, next to unusable. The Win 3.1 thing was just something that was done only for shits and giggles.

Considering my first Windows 3.0 machine was a 16 mhz 386 with 2mb of ram, I would think a 400 mhz ARM processor can easily run/emulate Windows 3.1.

ARM is a totally different architecture and instruction set so raw speed is not a good indicator of ability to emmulate. That's before we get to the hackfest that is the Windows API!

You'd be surprise, but not in a good way. You can get DOSBox to run Win3.1 (on a N8XX), but the start-up time is in the minutes, there are screen delays and the mouse/pointer thing still needs some work.

There a thread somewhere about running Win3.1 through DOSBox on a N900, but I think it's still slow & suffers from the same issues as above. That, dispite the fact the N900 has a processor that's about 2x more powerful than the N8XXs

Thanks for clearing stuff a bit

didnt know that, u can see im a bit n00b.

I just thought maybe it could be possible to run some windows applications through some emulator. The n900 has much more power and memory than n95 (though different interface), and i still could run even win95 with n95. pretty darn slow but still runs.

Off-topic but relevant.
If you use a linux [x86] "server" you could use x11 forwarding to use Windows programs (i.e. Photoshop) using WINE (on the linux x86 box)...for programs that work with WINE. Not very convenient though. Requires that middleman computer and etc. You could also just VNC into a Windows box. *shrug*

You could do it at a modest speed using techniques like QEMU - code translation from x86 to ARM - combined with Wine's libraries.

As a rough estimate, QEMU tends to run code about 20% of the native speed at best, but that is a rough guess especially when targetting a different CPU.

It will also use more memory than a real machine, but not hugely more.

So as a *very* rough estimate, I'll say it would be like running Windows on a PC with 120MHz Pentium/PentiumPro and 128MB RAM.

In other words, up to Windows 95/98, Windows NT4 at the speed of a PC from 14 years ago.

Windows 2000 would be a tight squeeze and slow, and XP would be very slow, if it fits in the memory at all.

The best performance would come from using QEMU (or another dynamic code translator) to provide the x86 emulation, with Wine libraries compiled natively. For some applications you might get good performance, if the heavy work is inside Windows itself (things like drawing widgets etc. with the application doing very little work). I don't think anyone has written that combination yet, though.

You could also make it work by running Wine (x86 version) using QEMU, and an X server. That would be much slower, but much easier to get it working. You might not need to write any code at all.