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Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

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Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#171
post #86
post #6

I can confirm that you can run (at least some) GUI apps if you start an X server on Windows (like Xming, etc.), and export DISPLAY.

Oh man, thanks for the tip! Works wonderfully. I just apt-get'ed synaptic and it seems totally functional :) Xemacs and Angband don't work, but the fact that so much works already bodes pretty well for the future.

Wait, someone still uses Xemacs? I think you're the first I've run across in a long while.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#172
Just switched the the 'fast' ring and have installed all updates, but can't see the new 'Windows Services for Linux' item in 'Features'. Anyone know how to fix it?

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#173
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean you "cannot" code on tablets and smartphones? There are nice interpreters and compilers in the official app stores for major mobiles OS, aren't there? I've used Python on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Also J, Ocaml, some dialects of Lisp, C# and Ruby, that I can remember now (each language on at least one of those OSes, sometimes more than one). Not to mention these devices all come with web browse…

I tried to code on smartphone, never again. I am x times more productive on desktop.

I've recently started using Termux on my phone with a bluetooth keyboard - I'm as productive as I would be doing dev over SSH. All the tools I'd use on a server are there (node, git, nano, etc). I've written a small API server with it and it wasn't a disaster. Admittedly I'm more productive when I'm on my laptop with Atom and a couple of monitors, but if that isn't an option I can still do work. It's a bonus rather than an alternative.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#174
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can create content on tablets, and some of it is excellent content. Development isn't done on tablets because the input devices we have to make code are limited to a keyboard, and most people think text files are code, rather than a serialisation/deserialisation format for an AST. You could easily build an AST with gestures and speech rather than tapping buttons, and I think in 10-20 years time that's how we'll m…

Plain text files are an incredibly powerful way of "storing ASTs", the advantages are far too numerous to list. The primary one being complete and total interoparability with all other tools that accept plain text files. I will bet you £100 that we won't be programming by speech and gestures in even 25 years time as the disadvantages are enormous.

Not saying we shouldn't store software as text. Just saying we don't need to make software with text.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#175
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more broad than that. The distinction lies in production versus consumption devices. Tablets and phones are consumption. You can't do any serious work on them - development included. This is why laptops and computers have stuck around in spite of the proliferation of cheap, tiny, elegant consumption devices. So no, I don't think laptops and computers will go away for non-nerds, just for people who don't produce…

You can create content on tablets, and some of it is excellent content. Development isn't done on tablets because the input devices we have to make code are limited to a keyboard, and most people think text files are code, rather than a serialisation/deserialisation format for an AST. You could easily build an AST with gestures and speech rather than tapping buttons, and I think in 10-20 years time that's how we'll m…

Actually AST edition with touch interface has been experimented by MS Research with Touch develop (https://www.touchdevelop.com/). In their editor you just insert/combine AST parts instead of typing them.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#176
post #6

I can confirm that you can run (at least some) GUI apps if you start an X server on Windows (like Xming, etc.), and export DISPLAY.

I currently don't have access to a Windows box, but am currently working on a CLI app in Swift for OSX and Linux. It would be interesting to see if this effectively makes swift cross-platform "for free".

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#177
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can create content on tablets, and some of it is excellent content. Development isn't done on tablets because the input devices we have to make code are limited to a keyboard, and most people think text files are code, rather than a serialisation/deserialisation format for an AST. You could easily build an AST with gestures and speech rather than tapping buttons, and I think in 10-20 years time that's how we'll m…

Plain text files are an incredibly powerful way of "storing ASTs", the advantages are far too numerous to list. The primary one being complete and total interoparability with all other tools that accept plain text files. I will bet you £100 that we won't be programming by speech and gestures in even 25 years time as the disadvantages are enormous.

> I will bet you £100 that we won't be programming by speech and gestures in even 25 years time as the disadvantages are enormous.

Unless AI advances considerably. For years I've imagined myself talking to the small specialized AI living in my computer, giving it instructions that it would translate to code...

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#178
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can create content on tablets, and some of it is excellent content. Development isn't done on tablets because the input devices we have to make code are limited to a keyboard, and most people think text files are code, rather than a serialisation/deserialisation format for an AST. You could easily build an AST with gestures and speech rather than tapping buttons, and I think in 10-20 years time that's how we'll m…

You could easily build an AST with gestures and speech rather than tapping buttons, and I think in 10-20 years time that's how we'll make software. I doubt it. Perhaps we'll be making ASTs by writing (i.e. drawing symbols with styli or pens), but I don't think we'll be doing it via gestures and speech. There's a reason that we don't teach math via interpretive dance.

There's also a reason people in the same room don't communicate by tapping buttons with letters on them.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#179
This is awesome! Can't wait to get my hands on it. If this works well, it is like a dream come true. I never wanted to abandon Windows because of a lot of music software that I am using. Now I will have the best of both worlds. Neat.

Re: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

#180

Can anyone comment to how nice or awful running some sort of Linux VM (maybe under Hyper-V) and using Putty to SSH to it for development on Windows would be? This work is promising, but doesn't appear "quite there", yet. I run OSX now, but don't really ever develop directly on the machine and am mostly SSH'ed to Linux hosts for development.

Our team uses a Vagrant box (on VirtualBox) as a development server. Getting it to run on Windows requires a couple extra steps compared to OSX, but it's not too bad. You will probably want to use an alternative to the VirtualBox filesystem sharing though, as it's extremely slow. We use a combination of rsync (installed on Windows via cygwin) and NFS (using this plugin for Windows: https://github.com/winnfsd/vagrant-winnfsd).

msysGit is also handy when using a Windows host.

Rsync is straightforward and has fewer permissions issues to work out when sharing with Windows, but is uni-directional. NFS is a true share rather than a sync, but restricts what you can do to the directories on the guest in terms of permissions. There are other options too, like bindfs and unison, but I haven't personally explored those in depth.

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