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Posts: 701 | Thanked: 585 times | Joined on Sep 2010 @ London, England
#48
Originally Posted by GeraldKo View Post
No, the source code is NOT included (much to many people's chagrin). I thought since it can run under WINE on desktop Linux, e.g., Ubuntu, it could likely run under WINE on a tablet. I'm wrong?
The problem here being that the processor on a desktop PC and the processor in the n900 are different architectures. Desktop PCs and laptops use x86 (and x86_64 for 64-bit) processors while the n900 (along with most other phones) uses an ARM processor. You can't take a program that has been compiled for one architecture and run it on another, it just won't work, you can only run it using an emulator and an emulator takes a lot of processing power to just to emulate a much slower processor.

WINE for desktop Linux just needs to pretend to be Windows to get a program to run, it doesn't need to emulate a different processor. WINE for ARM would need to emulate an x86 processor as well as pretending to be Windows if it were to run a regular Windows program.

What WINE for ARM provides is a easy way to port programs written for Windows to Linux-based ARM devices using winelib, but you need the source code so you can recompile the program to run on an ARM processor.
 

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