In my previous post in the old forum, I had discussed on how to run x86 applications with help from the community by using qemu-user-static and debootstrap:
However, after so much testing I found that Qemu is kind of slow to run an x86 application. And also at the moment qemu-user-static from AUR package failed to compile by using the latest Manjaro kernel, therefore it might be hard for you to follow.
After doing some research I found that there is a better alternative to Qemu in emulating x86, it is called “Box86”. It runs game faster than Qemu and probably runs faster than Hangover-Wine as well.
In fact there is a Distro called “TwisterOS” that manages to run “Box86” out of the box with high performance, but it is only limited for “Raspberry Pi” and “RK3399” chip. Even it can run a windows game very smoothly:
You could go with the chroot method to spin up a debian environment. Haven’t tried it myself.
The other way would be to use the chromium-docker as inspiration to get box86 working in pretty much the same way
I have been looking into this but it is only available for arm32bit version and this lead me to a dead end until box86 team come up with arm64 version of it.
I have discussed with twister os team and they seem to use multi-arch method where they have 64bit and 32bit userspace libraries which is alot of overhead for arm devices.
We will have to wait for box86 team to get it to work on arm64 until then someone can work with box86 to get it to work on arm64 arch.
This is actually what I am expecting from manjaro Arm. But, unfortunately Manjaro is only distributed in 64bit. But I don’t know if it is possible to add multi-arch on Manjaro.
Last time I tried docker, it failed to run the arm32 version. It can run only if “binfmt_misc” is installed from “qemu-user-static”. But at the moment the AUR package failed to compile in the latest manjaro version.
Finally I am successfully compiled the Box86 on Arm64 without using Qemu (No Need for Binfmt_misc compiled in your Kernel). The performance is quite promising as I am successfully installed Sketchup 7.1 and Sketchup 8 with very good graphic performance despite of using LLVM Pipe. At the moment I did this in Armbian, but in Theory Manjaro should also work.
And The Good News is that compiling Box86 in Aarch64 is quite easy compared to compiling “Qemu-User-Static” and “Hangover”, yet the result is quite unbelievably fast. It reminds me of kind of like “Rosetta 2” on Apple Silicon (It still needs some improvements).
I can confirm that chrooting to Debian Buster Armhf seems to work perfectly to run Wine x86 under Box86 on Manjaro Arm. And the graphics is amazingly good for LLVM Pipe drivers. Much better than Qemu.
This is great, it would be even better if it worked
Due to the lack of C.UTF-8, the schroot fails, after 3-4 hours I have given up
Maybe there is a trick?
When I give --debug it seems to choke on wineusb, everytime
usually when you copy and paste, in my case the format is changed for “C”
therefore, you have to edit it after copy-paste procedure, or you can also type it manually.
Make sure that it has to be exactly those line.
and don’t forget to enter those .bashrc twice according to my tutorial.
Yes, I found the malformed “C”
Even though it is LC_ALL=“C” , locale returns LC_ALL=C, lost quotes
I have managed to run winemine, winecfg, notepad, wineconsole,
but not notepad++
In step 7, sudo schroot … returns you out of chroot, so have to do real chroot to /usr/sbin/adduser
ie, ls; sudo schroot …; ls , shows same place
One is for your Real user
One is for your Chroot user
If you don’t do this, you’ll get trouble that you cannot solve in 3-4 hours earlier
If you don’t adduser you have to use chroot from sudo, meanwhile using sudo will prevent you from using GUI. Therefore you have to adduser to overcome this problem
Look at the last code (number 13 and 14), when installing and deploying an app, you do not need to enter sudo. Because you have add a user. Therefore now you can install any x86 apps that utilize GUI without a problem.
