wine on non-x86 architectures (presumably silly question)

[Duane Clark]

Frank Joerdens wrote:
> I wouldn't think it's possible but I'd like to know (with an
> explanation, if possible): Can you run win32 apps with wine on non-x86
> computers, e.g. under LinuxPPC?
> 
> I guess not, but I wouldn't be able to give a clear explanation as to
> why.

Not a silly question at all. No you cannot run native Windoze apps on 
non-X86 platforms. But, one of the purposes of wine is to provide the 
ability to recompile a windows program to run on other platforms, with 
no, or more likely a small amount, of changes. So someone with the 
source code to a windows program can now add support for any platform 
that runs Wine, with hopefully minimal trouble.

And note that Wine is being incorporated into OSes other than Linux. I 
have noticed some recent activity by employees of Sun to port Wine to 
Sparc Solaris. The only reason I see for doing that is they hope to then 
be able to convince some vendors of Windows programs to recompile their 
programs with Wine to run on the Sparc platform.