qemu & wine experiments on ARM

[Martin Langhoff]

Just a quick outline of one experiment to see if simple Win32
"content-ware" apps can be run. Commands may be missing switches,
options and steps. Caveat reader. BYO smarts.

On x87 host F17
 - install livecd-tools spin-kickstarts
 - copy fedora-live-mini.ks, add wine -- remove some stuff
 - sudo setarch i686 livecd-creator fedora-live-mini.ks
 - wait
 - copy resulting iso to ext disk
 - yumdownloader sgabios-bin-0-0.20110622SVN.fc17.noarch
seabios-bin-1.7.0-1.fc17.noarch -- they are noarch but missing from
arm repos. copy to ext disk

On ARM XO F17
 - install seabios-bin sgabios-bin rpms
 - yum -ty install qemu-system-x86 qemu-user
 - qemu-386 -m 512 -cdrom /some/media/fedora-mini.iso
   inside of the qemu window, in the live cd boot text menu press tab
to remove rhbg and quiet. boot slowly. Probably. Eventually.

Clearly, qemu can emulate x86 on ARM. Slowly. This is of course
impractical, mainly because you need to get through a bootprocess
before you can run an app and the app is not in a transparently shared
environment (it's in qemu's odd fb window).

Qemu's "user-mode" is a lot more practical. We would need a minimal
fedora x86 chroot that has wine, and use qemu over that. After a bit
of googling, I found PRoot, which seems to provide the right glue to
make qemu's user mode actually usable.

http://cedric-vincent.github.com/PRoot/
http://adt.cs.upb.de/quf/quf11/quf2011_13.pdf

For a truly minimal rootfs, mock is likely to be more useful than livecd-tools.



m
-- 
 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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