Notices

Spotify is developing some great mobile interfaces (just today they showed a demo with the a S60 device) but will take some time for them to also develop one for Maemo...

I know its far fetched but is this combination possible?

No, Spotify for windows is x86 application and N900 has ARM processor.

Well, why not? Music and wine can mix well. Either the mobile interface allows one handed operation with a glass in other hand (does it work with that S60 demo?) or I guess one can momentarily put the glass away :-)

Don't you have to pay for the mobile versions?
Whereas the web ones are free?

Well, if there really exists a demo version of spotify for S60, this specific issue is no issue at all, since there is no S60 for x86

it should "just" be a matter of porting from S60 to Maemo (whether or not that is easily done i cannot say).

but you can generally forget wine on the tablet. wine only executes x86 windows executables in a suitable environment for them, but for running such things on the ARM processor of the handhelds, you would need a real emulator like qemu, bochs, or the widely known vmware.

Well here is the video: https://www.spotify.com/blog/archive...potify-on-s60/

The point about ARM vs. x86 is about Wine support...Wine doesn't work on anything outside of x86. So if there will be Spotify for Maemo some day, it won't be through wine but with a native application. So no free desktop application, unfortunately that's simply not possible.

Anyway, there's mobile Spotify. It's available for the IPhone and Android (released today), so I see no reason whatsoever why they wouldn't develop a Maemo version if there was enough demand. However, one Maemo phone available (ok, not even released) most likely doens't count as "enough demand". Who knows, if we have several phones available next year and they start becoming more popular, then why not?

Anyway, mobile Spotify requires the 10 euros/month subscription, it's not free. So they might also look at how eager the Maemo crowd is about paying for services/applications before deciding to create a Maemoversion. Or well, I would at least

If Maemo gets anywhere near the Android-like (900% or whatever) growths rates next year, perhaps we'll see Spotify. That seems a bit unlikely though, but one can hope.

qemu, bosch and wmware are not emulators. They are virtual machines.
Let me explain it. Wine makes a windows program believe it is running over windows. To fool the program it has replicaded all the functions of the DLL's of windows, so when the program asks for something to the OS wine replies almost as if it was windows.

The program anyway is compiled to run in a given set of instructions, what is known as x86 (that is the PC CPU's).


A virtual machine is a little bit different. In this case the virtual machine makes the guest OS believe it is running all the computer for itself when in reality it is running in an envirnontment controlled by another OS. For that to work the Host simulates a bios and recreates some disk and memory drivers of the guest OS.

So in this case The given program of the first case actually runs over Windows and asks things to real windows DLL and OS, just that Windows is not taking control of the computer, but a subsection of it.

In this case, again, both the program and the OS are compiled using a given set of instructions and the CPU that the virtual machine runs in must understand those instructions.

Finally, an emulator is a program that reads one by one the instructions an emulated OS (or a program) is using, and one by one translates them to a new set of instructions and execute them.

Emulation can work for very old software because it normally ran in extremelly slow Hardware. And emulation can work well for game consoles because the OS is a very thin layer that do very little.

But when you must emulate not only the program (spotify) but the OS (fat windows) emulation is extremelly slow. And if you run it over a not so fast CPU it can become totally unusable.

qemu has two modes - system and user. system emulates whole computer, user mode just translates instructions but uses same linux OS. In theory Wine can be compiled ARM native and be coupled with user mode emulation for running x86 win32 binaries. In fact it was already started for PowerPC.

People talked about doing it for ARM but so far it has not materialized. Current ARM hardware is lacking both in memory and CPU when compared to current x86/Windows hardware so even without any emulation overhead the result for typical Windows applications wouldn't be great. Maybe that's the reason why developer interest was low so far.

VMs are in fact emulators. they emulate a different (or the same) system architecture for the guest OS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine#Techniques

wine on the other hand, is not an emulator. even it's own name says so

perhaps you have a different understanding of what constitutes an "emulation", but VMs are generally considered as such.