How to install Box64 on Raspberry Pi?

Raspberry Pi OS is an ARM based operating system that won’t allow you to directly run Windows applications on its environment. However, with the inclusion of Box64, the users will be able to run x64 applications with ease. Box64 is an emulation platform that converts the x64 program instructions to ARM instructions, allowing users to easily run x64 applications on Raspberry Pi desktop.

This tutorial guides you in installing Box64 on Raspberry Pi.

How to install Box64 on Raspberry Pi

In order to install Box64 on your Raspberry Pi operating system, you will first need to ensure that your OS must be 64-Bit version. To check the version of Raspberry Pi, use the following command:

$ uname -m

The above output “aarch64” confirms the presence of the 64-Bit version. Now, you will require to perform following steps to run x64 applications on Raspberry Pi using Box64:

Step 1: Update Packages

First, check the Raspberry Pi packages update using the following command:

$ sudo apt update -y

If packages are not updated, use the following command to upgrade them:

$ sudo apt upgrade -y

Step 2: Build essential packages

After the update, use the following command to install some packages required to run Box64 on Raspberry Pi.

$ sudo apt install git build-essential cmake

Step 3: Clone Box64 repository

Once the above installation is successful, you can then execute the following command to clone Box64 repository from git.

$ git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64.git

Step 4: Compile Box64

After completing the cloning process, it’s now time to run the Box64 on Raspberry Pi using the following steps:

1: Navigate to Box64 directory by issuing the following command:

$ cd box64

2: Now, create a directory with the name “build” using the following command so that the Box64 compilation files will be put into this folder.

$ mkdir build

3: Go to the “build” directory using the following command:

$ cd build

4: Now, generate some configuration files which helps to efficiently compile Box64 on Raspberry Pi.

$ cmake .. -DRPI4ARM64=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo

5: After successfully generating the above files, execute the following command to compile Box64:

$ make -j4

6: After completing the installation process, execute the following command to install Box64 on Raspberry Pi.

$ sudo make install

7: In the end, use the following command to restart binfmt service as this will help Raspberry Pi understand that it can run x64 applications using Box64.

$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt

After completing the above steps, reboot the device for the changes to take place. To confirm the Box64 version, use the following command:

$ box64 --version

The above output confirms that the latest version of Box64 is installed on Raspberry Pi.

Conclusion

Box64 is a perfect emulation platform that allows the users to run x64 applications on the 64-Bit Raspberry Pi operating system. The installation of Box64 is pretty simple which can be completed after cloning its repository into the Raspberry Pi repository list. Afterwards, you can use the make and build commands to install the required files for running the Box64 application on Raspberry Pi desktop.

How to install Box64 on Raspberry Pi? – 4 Easy Steps