VCDS on Android via Ubuntu. Can it be done?

I've recently picked up a new Samsung Galaxy s2 and I've been doing some reading. Apparently, once rooted the thing will run Ubuntu quite well. My thought was if it will run Ubuntu, I should be able to run WINE or similar windows emulator and therefore run VCDS off my smartphone.

Sounds like a plan to me but I've not yet rooted my phone. I want to go atleast a month before I void my warranty .

Will VCDS run on an ARM7 chip emulating an x86/x64 environment? Or am I asking my little 1.2ghz dual-core to do too much? I noticed by benchmark scores it is the fastest phone on the market so if any phone can do it, it would be this one.

Thoughts/Comments?

This is not in any way officially supported by Ross-Tech. Also, I have never heard of anybody trying this. Therefore, there is only one way to tell - try it. I have doubts that it will work properly, but you never know until you try it.

Even if it runs, it will probably run quite slowly. Emulation is always slow and the ARM processor is no speed demon to begin with. If the program runs, it will probably be OK for reading and resetting fault codes, but I would not rely on it for data logging for the above reason. Good luck! (and let us know how/if it works.

Have Fun!

Don

I would first try to get VCDS running with Wine on a current version of Ubuntu (or another Linux OS) on a standard chipset. There are some threads about this on Vortex but I don't think a bulletproof solution has been found yet (though I'd like to be wrong about this!). Trying to do it on an ARM processor on a phone can only make things harder!

It would be nice if Ross Tech hurried up and released their mobile wifi software... I'd take VCDS in a browser on my smartphone...

I thought Wine only emulated the windows api , and not the x86 instruction set. (i.e. it is an api compatibility layer, not a virtual machine). Because of this, it should be impossible to run windows apps in wine on non-x86 architectures. Even if there were an x86 VM available, the needs of the Windows-based VCDS with its drivers are complex enough (and mobile phone hardware different enough) that it would be virtually guaranteed not to work.

I think you'd have better luck asking Ross-Tech to publish an andriod app, or make available enough information about their hardware (e.g. hex-can dongle) that you could develop your own driver and vcds-like software that runs on Dalvik

You obviously like a challenge! I think birkie is right WINE is more of a way to run Windows apps. It might work, but I suspect you might get timing issues even if you have enough ram and cpu power to do it.

I do run VCDS on a Ubuntu laptop using Wine. Wine is NOT an emulator.

Wine is not an emulator, but is instead a compatibility layer, providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call[citation needed], and a process to substitute for the Windows NT kernel. Wine is predominantly written using Black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues.[2]

Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

Now getting it to work on a non x86/x64 environment....

What he said

Farfromovin said:

It would be nice if Ross Tech hurried up and released their mobile wifi software... I'd take VCDS in a browser on my smartphone...

Click to expand...

I agree

Apparently, QEMU will run just fine on android. So maybe running Win2k via QEMU might be the better approach. My biggest concern is the RAM, the phone only has 1gb and it needs about 1/3 of that just to run the android OS.

I've also ordered a bluetooth OBDII dongle off of ebay to work with the Torque app. It's not VCDS but it might come in handy.

flatlanded said:

the phone only has 1gb and it needs about 1/3 of that just to run the android OS.

Click to expand...

Not even close. Most phones today are running 2.1 or 2.2, as such the OS can only see / use around 360M of ram even if you had 512M or more.

When my phone boots up, I have around 200M free, so I suspect without a bunch of widgets and running apps, you should only expect the OS to eat up around 150M, but I'm saying this off the top of my head without detailed research.

So I'd say your estimate is off by double