Ubuntu on Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#421

Post by homulilly » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:13 PM UTC

icc97 wrote: post #402

homulilly wrote: post #394

Is this still going to be using the absolutely dreadfull conhost? Because that's the biggest shortcoming windows currently has with its interactive command line tools, cmd.exe and powershell are both usable, not great (okay, pretty bad honestly, but usable) when you don't consider the shitty terminal they force you into using.

I agree conhost is terrible - but they have finally made some improvements in Windows 10 [1]: - Drag-to-resize - Automatic text reflowing on resize - Ctrl + X/C/V support for cut/copy/paste - Selection that does line-wrapping - Transparency - A full-screen mode [1]: http://futurice.com/blog/a-saner-windows-command-line-part-1

Ctrl+Key shortcuts aren't going to work in bash (at least not without breaking other important stuff) so I'm hoping they decide to make quickedit mode more usable someday.

Unfortunately I still think this is going to be kind of a shitshow as long as they keep the black box nature of conhost. The terminal apps OSX and most linux distros ship with are fairly bare-bones too and I doubt reprogrammable 256-color mode is on microsoft's roadmap.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#422

Post by supertastic » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

takeda wrote: post #233

Surprised I don't see anyone else mentioning this. This looks to me like typical Microsoft strategy that they utilized a lot 25 years ago. 1. when not leader in given market, make your product fully compatible with competitor 2. start gaining momentum (e.g. why should I use Linux, when on Windows I can run both Linux and Windows applications) 3. once becoming leader break up compatibility 4. rinse and repeat Happened…

Even more surprised that no one seems to recall that they did exactly this back in the day. There was a version of the NT4 kernel that could run Unix programs. "Great, the program selection of Unix with the stability of windows!" people sneered, but still there was a market for it.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#423

Post by dvdcxn » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

rsp1984 wrote: post #416

AimHere wrote: post #326

It's time that people stopped using the term 'Windows' for this operating system. The Free Software Foundation created the bulk of the userspace, under terms that allow anyone to share, modify and fork the programs, and then Microsoft came along with the one last missing piece of the puzzle - the kernel, and completed the full operating system, which, to be frank, users find completely unusable and worthless without…

I have problems understanding your point here. What was announced was not a new operating system but a translation layer built into Windows 10 that translates Linux system calls to their Windows counterparts. I also bet many people would disagree with your statement that W10 is unusable and worthless without this feature. The Windows kernel always existed and has evolved over the years: NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10.…

He's referencing Stallman's infamous stance on the nomenclature of Linux

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#424

Post by Filthy_casual » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

llomlup wrote: post #412

riotdash wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest here. Does this change make some developers actually even consider to change their OS X/Linux Desktops to Windows? Yeah it is really cool thing that we can finally use windows cmd like the terminal on unix systems however: - What about lack of all the Linux/OS X GUI software? - What about lack of all the UNIX OS features? - What about all those billions and billions of Windows malware, viruses, adware…

Although I've been a primarily C# dev for years, I gradually moved to Ubuntu, and then to OSX, all because of the better terminal/s. I like Macs, but OSX, its window management system, finder, is really bad. Having bash environment available on Windows is an incredible feat and a reason alone to reconsider Windows again. Hopefully, it won't be limited to W10.

Hopefully? Sorry for bursting your bubble but Windows 10 is the ONE way to go, from their perspective.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#425

Post by voltagex_ » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

Kevin Gallo just announced that there'll be more information live at Build at 4:30pm PDT.

https://channel9.msdn.com/?wt.mc_id=build_hp

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#426

Post by david-given » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:17 PM UTC

tropo wrote: post #361

david-given wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That "big pile of key-value strings pushed onto the stack above the environment" is auxv. You can see it in the binary /proc/*/auxv files. It's generated by the kernel's ELF loader.

Arrgh! I wish I'd known that six years ago. It'd have made life so much easier. I was trying to figure them out from reading the source code...

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#427

Post by icc97 » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

ramy_d wrote: post #266

NateDad wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. No GUI applications (currently, and no announced future support... and I wouldn't bank on them doing it).

vim?

You can already run vim from the msys git distribution

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#428

Post by sveiss » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:19 PM UTC

homulilly wrote: post #394

Is this still going to be using the absolutely dreadfull conhost? Because that's the biggest shortcoming windows currently has with its interactive command line tools, cmd.exe and powershell are both usable, not great (okay, pretty bad honestly, but usable) when you don't consider the shitty terminal they force you into using.

Hopefully they'll include emulation for ptys, which will make it very easy for you to run your terminal emulator of choice instead of relying on on conhost.

If they're smart, they'll allow a Linux ABI exe to sit on one end of a pty, and Win32/UWP exe on the other, so people can use a native Windows terminal emulator instead of needing Xming or similar.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#429

Post by UK-AL » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:19 PM UTC

geertj wrote: post #207

System call emulation ... The end goal of this would be to run Docker containers natively on Windows, right?

They have their own container technology with a docker API.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#430

Post by sarthakk » Wed, Mar 30, 2016, 10:21 PM UTC

I am curious to see how Microsoft execute on the implementation of the user model for this: would user accounts used while running bash (or other utilities) correspond to actual Windows accounts (and integrate modes like "Run as administrator" with "sudo" calls from within the shell) or whether accounts for these binaries would exist separately (the demo video linked in one of the comments shows everything running as 'root' but it is a preview after all). I guess we will find out.