James,
Will there be a port of WINE to OS/390 mainframe USS? LINUX runs fine under USS, so it would seem that WINE should run there as well. Has anyone done this yet?
To clear up a possible misunderstanding first: Linux for S/390 does *not* run under USS or under OS/390.
OS/390 is (one of) the standard operating system(s) used on S/390 mainframes. One component of OS/390, the Unix System Services (USS), provides an environment that allows to run certain Unix applications. However, USS is not itself an operating system, just an ABI layer on top of OS/390 (somewhat similar to the POSIX subsystem of Windows NT).
Linux for S/390, on the other hand, is a true port of the Linux operating system to the S/390 hardware. It runs directly on the S/390 platform, *instead* of OS/390 or any other mainframe operating system.
This has the effect that while USS is much more integrated into the OS/390 environment, Linux on S/390 is much more similar to 'real' Unix platforms. Porting Unix or Linux applications to USS is often non-trivial (e.g. gcc does not run on USS at all), while porting to Linux on S/390 is most of the time just a recompile.
What I want to say by that is that a port of Wine to *USS* seems rather unlikely, given the difficulties I mentioned. However, a port to *Linux* on S/390 should really be possible, and some time ago I already did a proof-of-concept implementation.
Of course, a port of Wine to any non-Intel hardware means just a port of the Wine *library* at the moment, as Wine does not contain a Intel processor emulator and cannot run Windows/Intel binaries on non-Intel hardware. James (Hatheway) has already explained this ...
Bye, Ulrich