Live data from Hacker News

Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

41–50 of 434 posts

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#41

I'll be interested in hearing from anyone who uses this and finds it offers them more than they are currently getting from cygwin or VMware+Linux VM. I realize it's a very different beast from cygwin - an entire User Mode Linux environment, as opposed to being able to download windows versions of the Linux Environment, but, on a day to day basis, It will be interesting to see what people do differently, and why they…

I'm using it on my tablet instead of previously using a VMWare image and msys+mingw+cygwin.

The main advantage over a VM is no resource partitioning: on a 4GB RAM tablet with 64GB eMMC, you can't allocate more than 2GB RAM to a VM without trouble, and putting 20GB of disk aside for it is also a pain., and much improved power efficiency (even an idle VM drastically reduces battery life, while Ubuntu for Windows doesn't).

Compared to Cygwin: a lot more packages are available, a lot more just works out of the box, and you can painlessly use online tutorials for Linux, which often assume Ubuntu and don't consider Cygwin a target platform.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#43
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it's going to make it worse. When you type python in a command prompt which version is going to run, the windows version or the Ubuntu version? Even worse when you pip install a package what pip are you running, windows or Ubuntu? Python on Windows is painful mostly because of the amount of binary packages that have to be compiled since distributing binary packages hasn't been in vogue until only recently…

Command prompt should run the windows version and bash should run the linux version. Why would there be an issue here?

So will the bash prompt not see any tools like windows python in the windows system path? That seems like an odd decision if so.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#45
post #41

I'll be interested in hearing from anyone who uses this and finds it offers them more than they are currently getting from cygwin or VMware+Linux VM. I realize it's a very different beast from cygwin - an entire User Mode Linux environment, as opposed to being able to download windows versions of the Linux Environment, but, on a day to day basis, It will be interesting to see what people do differently, and why they…

I'm using it on my tablet instead of previously using a VMWare image and msys+mingw+cygwin. The main advantage over a VM is no resource partitioning: on a 4GB RAM tablet with 64GB eMMC, you can't allocate more than 2GB RAM to a VM without trouble, and putting 20GB of disk aside for it is also a pain., and much improved power efficiency (even an idle VM drastically reduces battery life, while Ubuntu for Windows doesn'…

since you are already up and running may I ask what friends have been asking me? Can you apt-get install zsh ?

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#48
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Command prompt should run the windows version and bash should run the linux version. Why would there be an issue here?

Exactly. The Linux file system will have Windows mounted into it but I think Windows won't be able to see the Linux filesystem. We will see.

Linux and Windows can both see each others filesystem, but they are visible at specific mount points in each environment.

You can't just use /home/chx/todo.txt as a path from any Windows application, but you can find that file through some other path.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#49
I am a little scared from the distinction we are start to make between "computers" and "developers' computers"

In most computer nowadays you cannot code (tables and smartphones), are computers doomed to be an expensive tool for few "nerd" ? What will be the impact on computer literacy ?

Post reply on HN