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Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

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Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - yes, we register the '.exe' extension with binfmt that then triggers WSL whenever a .exe is launched, allowing us to go find and spawn the requested Win32 process. If you just want to type `code ` (without the .exe), then you can create an alias that resolves to code.exe. Same for Notepad, etc. :)

Would I be able to setup Linux environment in VS? i.e. would I be able to include and write POSIX application with this update?

Did you watch the video? ;) Take a look at Visual C++ for Linux: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/03/30/visual-c-...

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - yes, we register the '.exe' extension with binfmt that then triggers WSL whenever a .exe is launched, allowing us to go find and spawn the requested Win32 process. If you just want to type `code ` (without the .exe), then you can create an alias that resolves to code.exe. Same for Notepad, etc. :)

WSL is great, I use it every day and am very much looking forward to the next update. Regarding future work, are there any plans to make the emulated Linux filesystem usable in the rest of Windows e.g. via a drive mapping?

Thanks and glad you like it so far ;)

We are keen to smooth out some of the filesystem interop challenges. There's a reason we've not yet removed the Beta label ;)

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#273

Just a note to anyone looking to go down this road: IO performance is still pretty awful last I checked. If your workflow is IO intensive (non trivial Rails app, let's say), proceed w/ caution. https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/5ece... - My last check.

Is this why Visual Studio is scp'ing source files around, instead of just copying the files to that /mnt/d directory and invoking the compiler there? That seemed like a big hack to me and it wasn't exactly clear why they were doing it that way (near the end, last five minutes).

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would I be able to setup Linux environment in VS? i.e. would I be able to include and write POSIX application with this update?

Did you watch the video? ;) Take a look at Visual C++ for Linux: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/03/30/visual-c-...

Yes, I did, and it didn't answer my question, but the blog post does. Thanks.

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#275
When I was playing around with WSL a few months ago, I came across this emphatic caution from the devs to not modify any files in the Linux subsystem using Windows applications (aka anything with a GUI)[1]. Apparently it destroys file metadata and breaks things.

I know it's not that hard to keep your stuff in /mnt/c or wherever, but I wonder if there is any plan (or if it's even possible) to eliminate this last bit of incompatibility.

Is it possible to run a GUI version of the Linux version of VSCode on WSL?

1. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the `file` command, it's tools for working with files: chgrp, chmod, mv, rm, etc. These have all been folded into coreutils these days, which also does not contain the `file` utility. Ubuntu and practically all other Linux distros ship BSD's file utility.

My apologies, I mis-spoke. I've flogged myself mercilessly and shall not make that same mistake again ;)

No worries :) Nice talk, good work to the team at MS!

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#278

I'm still afraid to fully depend on this, and i'm sure i will be for years to come, but this is by far the most i've been interested in windows. Who knows, in 3 years i might be able to ditch OSX for Windows, because some of the Surface devices actually look decent (no idea how true it is tho) .

I ditched OSX for a Surface Book and am really happy with it. I use WSL everyday and primarily develop in Ruby.

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to access network drives yet? If not, is this something that's being worked on? Thanks!

Access network drives? Via SSH? Sure. Via Samba? Yep: https://www.samba.org/~garming/ If you mean MOUNT network drives, then, not yet, alas. But yes we're keen to build that support when we can.

I think they mean network drives mounted or accessed in Windows. For example, from WSL I can't access files on my network share (in windows it's \\pc-name\\shared, where pc-name is running Samba under Linux). Mapping a drive letter to it doesn't work either - the only thing that shows up in /mnt is c. This is quite a pain.

Re: Bash and Windows Subsystem for Linux Demo [video]

#280
post #104

With something called Cygnal, you can make native Windows applications, while taking avantage of all the POSIX interfaces in Cygwin. No special subsystem required, just some DLL's. http://www.kylheku.com/cygnal/

With all the drawbacks that Cygwin entails. Plus the requirement to rebuild the code instead of just using the Linux-native ELF binary. Those are two things with very different goals.

Which drawbacks are those? (One is performance, unfortunately).

Rebuilding the code is the norm in the GNU/Linux landscape.

Is Ubuntu x86_64 built from Fedora x86_64 packages? Etc.

The requirement "I want to run Linux stuff on Windows without rebuilding" is basically stupid, because you normally don't even run stuff from Linux distro A on Linux distro B without rebuilding.

It sort of works for programs that have minimal, reasonably old dependencies.

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