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Ubuntu on Windows

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Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#161

Post by pcwalton »

bpye wrote: post #110
mmebane wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

http://stackoverflow.com/a/67293/3965517 indicates that NT does support fork properly, just not exposed to usermode normally.

fork() is exposed to user mode, but it's an undocumented private API. Pass the handle of the parent process as the 4th parameter and TRUE as the 5th parameter to NtCreateProcess: http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/index.html?page=UserMode...

The problem is that the Win32 user mode system will fight you every step of the way: CSRSS will not understand what you just did, for example. It's not generally worth it.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#162

Post by icefox »

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…

Some long term thoughts:

1) Linux has won the server (web) market. Developers would like to use a Unix box to work on their server code so they typically move to OS X. This could prevent that switch because they can still use Windows to developer their Linux server software.

2) Many projects start out as Linux and stay Linux and are only ported after much time and effort to Windows. Enterprises when faced with a tool that they want to use will also look to switch off Windows. Now rather than the cost of switching they only have to pay to upgrade their windows boxes to use the tool.

3) There is now a major incentive for developers to only build Linux binaries because it will work more places. This might cause a faster drain of developers as they eventually remove all windows specific code and can more easily migrate elsewhere. This feels eerily similar to the OS2 story and no doubt in the next week I expect to see more than a few articles discussing this very thing.

4) It will be much easier for Microsoft to bring much loved Linux tools to Windows so you can expect to see a more rapid increase of tools announced that now work for Windows.

5) Games: What about the graphical layer? Can I write the majority of my game as a Linux binary and only have the rendering bit left over to separately implement for Linux/Windows? Will this spur an increase of cross platform games?

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#164

Post by wyldfire »

> But there are some imperfections still, especially around tty's an the vt100

Yeah, it would be excellent if something like gnome-terminal worked well with this linux ABI.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#165

Post by dec0dedab0de »

zymhan wrote: post #71
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I cannot possibly imagine a world where Microsoft cannibalizes their Windows Server sales by creating a Windows Emulation Layer for Linux. Crossover is probably the best you'll get: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-linux Otherwise, if you only need Windows to game, I'd highly suggested PCI Passthrough so that you can use your GPU in a Windows VM: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_…

I cannot possibly imagine a world where Microsoft cannibalizes their Windows Server sales by creating a Windows Emulation Layer for Linux.

Are there any Windows only server applications that would be useful in a non windows shop? I'm not trying to be snarky, I really can't think of any.

I would expect the most likely users to convert would be those using job specific desktop software.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#166

Post by joshumax »

david-given wrote: post #151
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…

So, uh. I did this! Crudely. In 2010. http://cowlark.com/lbw/ It's a Linux syscall translator for Windows. It works well enough to run a Debian userland, although it's got so many holes and rough edges that I would never, ever, ever suggest using it for anything other than a stunt. It uses Interix to do most of the heavy lifting, so all LBW does is to translate from Linux syscalls to Interix syscalls; so we get a Uni…

I used to use your program on my XP box a while back... I told an MS exec about it and he seemed really impressed. It would be funny if they got some of the core ideas for this from LBW.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#167

Post by [deleted] »

david-given wrote: post #151
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…

So, uh. I did this! Crudely. In 2010. http://cowlark.com/lbw/ It's a Linux syscall translator for Windows. It works well enough to run a Debian userland, although it's got so many holes and rough edges that I would never, ever, ever suggest using it for anything other than a stunt. It uses Interix to do most of the heavy lifting, so all LBW does is to translate from Linux syscalls to Interix syscalls; so we get a Uni…

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#169

Post by kuschku »

xienze wrote: post #92
kuschku wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As another posted pointed out, if you just want to bring up a VM for gaming, who cares? Also, you can share directories between the native filesystem and the VM quite easily. And if you're using something like VirtualBox or VMWare there are "unity" windowing modes available.

> Also, you can share directories between the native filesystem and the VM quite easily. And if you're using something like VirtualBox or VMWare there are "unity" windowing modes available.

I tried them – they don’t work at all in KDE.

Arch linux host, KDE as DE, Windows 10 Guest, just leads to a big black box in unified mode, and windows don’t properly occur in the KDE taskbar.

What I expect is integration equal to WINE – automatically putting stored data into the correct folders, easily accessible and mounted, integrating windows with the taskbar, etc.

And yes, this is "just for games" – but try gaming on a multiscreen setup when the game doesn’t show up in your taskbar and you can’t minimize it.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#170

Post by melloc »

otterley wrote: post #26

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... ).

You can't use lx-branded zones in Solaris anymore, but SmartOS has revived and continued the project, and OmniOS has started porting the bits into their distribution, too.
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