Ubuntu on Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#81

Post by drinchev » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

mmebane wrote: post #54

captainmuon wrote: post #47

A few random thoughts: - Wow, hell is really freezing over! - The hardest part of running bash and other posix things under windows is filesystem access. Windows uses drive letters and backslashes, unix has a root filesystem with forward slashes. It seems they are taking the same route as cygwin by "mounting" windows drives in /mnt/c (or /cygdrive/c). - If you just wanted bash and some posix tools, the harder but nic…

> It seems they are taking the same route as cygwin by "mounting" windows drives in /mnt/c (or /cygdrive/c). I wonder if this Unix filesystem layer will be able to break the Windows legacy path length limit. If so, the Linux version of Node.js will suddenly become much more useful than the Windows version. > It remains to be seen if this is better (more performant) or worse Sounds like performance, at least, will be…

Just a remark. npm's team fixed long paths in v3.0, so now you have "flat tree".

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#82

Post by thought_alarm » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

15+ years ago Microsoft shipped a UNIX subsystem for Windows NT/2k.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

It blew my mind at the time, but it was kind of a pain and I didn't stick with it. I don't remember why.

I guess this is about same thing, only its Linux instead of some other sort of UNIX.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#83

Post by akiselev » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

tonymillion wrote: post #17

UK-AL wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem awhile ago, not sure what happened to it. The NT Kernel was designed to have different personalities like Win32, OS/2, POSIX, etc It could be an updated version.

I came here to make the same comment. Its ironic (old)microsoft exerted so much effort to put the personalities in place (OS/2, posix etc), then (mid)microsoft systematically destroyed that work under Balmer, and now (new)microsoft are reimplementing the same thing under a (seemingly) completely different system.

To be fair, this new implementation is very completely different. If we had the same kind of experience with virtualization and hardware with VT-i/x/d or AMD-V when Microsoft was developing personalities, the chips would have landed very differently.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#84

Post by dllthomas » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #79

xienze wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance hit is so negligible on modern hardware that the distinction doesn't really matter.

Except, it does matter. Not having a unified filesystem, not having a unified window manager, etc are quite some issues.

Those are not meaningful issues for the stated use case of playing some handful of games.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#85

Post by zhobbs » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

hodwik wrote: post #48

How in God's green earth did Canonical think helping Microsoft with this was a good idea for the Linux community?

It helps push Windows developers to use Ubuntu on Azure.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#86

Post by bryanlarsen » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #77

look_lookatme wrote: post #65

What is up with the unix-y directory structure in this screenshot? http://o.aolcdn.com/dims-global/dims3/GLOB/resize/1345x666/q... It's been a while since I've used Windows but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a unix directory structure... is it the case that they map / to a folder inside windows?

Yes, as mentioned in the article, / on the Linux side maps to C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs\, and C:\ on the Windows side maps to /mnt/c/ on the Linux side. Think of it as an Ubuntu chroot on Windows, with C:\ bind-mounted into the chroot.

I get the impression that it's a new filesystem, so C:\Users\Kirkland\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs is a file containing a linuxy file system that's mounted onto / in the Linux subsystem and onto C:\Users\Kirkland\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs\ on the Windows subsystem.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#87

Post by mark_l_watson » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

I am a little annoyed at myself. One of my 5 laptops is a HPStream 11 that was running Windows 10 until a few months ago when I wiped the disk and installed Ubuntu. Windows 10 is not bad at all, and I would have enjoyed keeping a Windows 10 machine handy with the new Ubuntu user land support.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#88

Post by andoma » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #57

cabirum wrote: post #16

Are posix permissions supported/emulated? Or are they set to 777 for all Windows drives in /mnt like shared folders in a VM?

Yeah, that's something that really interests me. Likewise I want to know how extended attributes and streams are mapped.

Or unlinking an open file. Something you can't do on traditional Windows kernels IIRC.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#89

Post by vram22 » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

Microsoft also had or still has something called SFU - Services For Unix. I know they were working on it some years ago. But that could be for some sort of interoperability, not the same as this thing.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#90

Post by simonlc » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #46

microsoft is leveraging FOSS Linux to get Mac users. I think it's a real smart move. The author points to using grep and Xargs and some other tools to quickly update a package. That's the key here. These bash/Linux utilities are productivy boosters for all the Linux and Mac/bsd people out there. I can't imagine living without them and they're necessary for any system I develop on (which is currently a Mac).

I completely agree. I only really switched to OSX because getting node tools to work on windows and cygwin is a pita.