Ubuntu on Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#21

Post by dec0dedab0de » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

zymhan wrote: post #4

"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"." I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on yo…

I would rather have the opposite. I would even pay for an official "Windows on Linux". There is a handful of games I would like to play, but other than that I have no interest in windows.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#22

Post by anonymfus » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

zymhan wrote: post #4

"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"." I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on yo…

>Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source

More correctly would be to say that Microsoft has advantage of user space libraries used in GNU/Linux distributions being open-source. Linux kernel itself being GPL2 is probably a problem for Microsoft's developers because of possibility to be accidentally exposed to it while researching documentation.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#23

Post by sabarn01 » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

abritishguy wrote: post #19

I wonder how buggy thus is. For example, how do symlinks work given windows doesn't have an equivalent that behaves the same.

Windows does have symlinks and hardlinks that work very similarly but are only exposed via a built in cmd command. That said no one uses them.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#24

Post by dec0dedab0de » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

xaduha wrote: post #5

> Windows 10 users > Can open the Windows Start menu > And type "bash" [enter] > Which opens a cmd.exe console Right... Bash is a shell, but your interaction with it is controlled by a terminal program. Unless there are some real changes to cmd.exe t̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶i̶v̶e̶ . You can compile a native bash and other utils now yourself, it's not that hard. EDIT: It's more like a Linuxul…

If you just need bash on windows installing Git is the easiest way.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#25

Post by drewg123 » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

zymhan wrote: post #4

"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"." I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on yo…

*BSD and Solaris have done have run linux binaries for years. Doing it on Windows is a bit more impressive, but given that there is a POSIX subsystem, its not all that surprising.

I didn't see any information about whether they do it using direct system call translation, or if they do it using shared library inter-positioning. In either case, its pretty cool!

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#26

Post by otterley » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

To clarify, it sounds like what Microsoft has added to Windows 10 is a Linux ABI.

This has been done before with other x86 OSes: FreeBSD has had 32-bit ABI compatibility for at least a decade (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html), and the "lx branded zone" for Solaris has it as well (https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/817-1592/gchhy/index.ht...).

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#27

Post by digi_owl » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

anonymfus wrote: post #22

zymhan wrote: post #4

"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"." I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on yo…

>Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source More correctly would be to say that Microsoft has advantage of user space libraries used in GNU/Linux distributions being open-source. Linux kernel itself being GPL2 is probably a problem for Microsoft's developers because of possibility to be accidentally exposed to it while researching documentation.

Thats why you do it clean room style.

One team to document, one team to implement based on that document.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#28

Post by wvenable » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

sabarn01 wrote: post #23

abritishguy wrote: post #19

I wonder how buggy thus is. For example, how do symlinks work given windows doesn't have an equivalent that behaves the same.

Windows does have symlinks and hardlinks that work very similarly but are only exposed via a built in cmd command. That said no one uses them.

I use them. They're also heavily used by the OS itself -- the entire WinSxS folder structure is a whole lot of symlinks.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#29

Post by freekh » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

What? This is sick!? I can't wait for this to happen! Maybe I am gonna get one of those Surface Books after all... though I am gonna miss my i3 setup... I wonder if X (or wayland! or wayland...) can run as well... Native Emacs FTW :)

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#30

Post by xaduha » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #7

xaduha wrote: post #5

> Windows 10 users > Can open the Windows Start menu > And type "bash" [enter] > Which opens a cmd.exe console Right... Bash is a shell, but your interaction with it is controlled by a terminal program. Unless there are some real changes to cmd.exe t̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶i̶v̶e̶ . You can compile a native bash and other utils now yourself, it's not that hard. EDIT: It's more like a Linuxul…

You seem to completely miss the point of what they did. It is not a simple Bash recompilation for Windows. It is a way to run Linux (Ubuntu) binaries on Windows.

My point is that you need a terminal program (like putty or iTerm2 on OS X for example) to get all the benefits.