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Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

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Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#21

Post by joelthelion »

cssmoo wrote: post #14
sz4kerto wrote: post #7

If this can bring me a working * nix shell under Windows, I'd be extremely happy. Windows is great for everything except I have never learned PS as well as I know the * nix shells -- with this, I could enjoy the hardware and proper multi-monitor support, speed and stability (seriously) of Windows and use the * nix command line.

To be honest, and I say this with a massive cringe, after 20 years of Unix I'm more productive with PS in a couple of months! It's quite refreshingly easy to use and I genuinely had no idea how much time I was wasting on parsing streams. Now I feel horrible for revealing my dirty secret :(

What do you use for grep?

I tried using Powershell and did a few things with it, but while it is a great shell, the lack of good tools like grep prevented me from being really productive.

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#22

Post by lelandbatey »

mappu wrote: post #10

Cygwin is impressively complete - if you haven't checked in on it recently, there are over 5000 packages in the official repo (that's more than Arch Linux's official repos), and adding the http://cygwinports.org/ repo gives you full KDE, GNOME 3 and Xfce on windows (although KDE has a first-party port). What this tool offers over Cygwin is the ability to run unmodified linux binary-only software for which you do not…

I also want to out in a good word for Cygwin. It's fantastic, I have absolutely no complaints about it. I have python and GCC, as well as a fully working shell. I can do Linux development in either of my favorite languages (Python and C++) without any kind of worry, and they work without modification on Linux.

Plus, having a working Bash with everything I want on Windows blows my mind.

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#23

Post by sspiff »

rossy wrote: post #15
sgt wrote: post #12

Cmd.exe is an abomination though - and Cygwin defaults to using it for terminal use. I see that this project also does that.

> Cmd.exe is an abomination though Agreed, but I don't think Cygwin defaults to it any more. It uses mintty now, which understands Cygwin ptys and has a native Windows interface. I guess you could also use an X11 terminal emulator in this project.

Correct. Cygwin has used mintty as a default since 2011[1].

[1]: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2011-11/msg00040.html

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#24

Post by cturner »

As cool as this is, a remaining problem I'd have for using Windows is that I've found git to be slow there. For example, the responsiveness of 'git status'. I'd guess this is something to do with NTFS being optimised for things different than unix-tradition filesystems. If so, this tool wouldn't improve that. Does anyone know more about this area?

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#25

Post by matthewmacleod »

Intermernet wrote: post #17

Firstly, this looks brilliant. If anyone can remove the extra layers of cygwin, mingw, xming etc. and provide a direct ability to execute linux programs from powershell/cmd , I call Black Magic. Voodoo I tell you; Windows cannot be this user friendly (I work with it every day). Secondly, completely off topic, I noticed that Github picks up 0.4% of the code-base as Objective-C ( https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux/se…

Github's language detection is actually open-source — you can have a look at what it does here: https://github.com/github/linguist

Linguist uses a number of different 'strategies' to identify the language – in the case of C vs. Objective C, it uses a pretty simple heuristic (https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...) to disambiguate C/C++/ObjC where required (such as in header files, which can't be disambiguated by file extension.)

In this case, the content of the file can't be reliably disambiguated, so I imagine it'll probably fall back to the Bayesian classifier. Interesting that the classifier identifies it as Objective C though!

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#26

Post by cron »

joelthelion wrote: post #21
cssmoo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, and I say this with a massive cringe, after 20 years of Unix I'm more productive with PS in a couple of months! It's quite refreshingly easy to use and I genuinely had no idea how much time I was wasting on parsing streams. Now I feel horrible for revealing my dirty secret :(

What do you use for grep? I tried using Powershell and did a few things with it, but while it is a great shell, the lack of good tools like grep prevented me from being really productive.

`select-string` or it's alias `sst`. I find myself filtering collections of objects far more frequently then grepping lines when using powershell.

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#27

Post by HaseebR7 »

sz4kerto wrote: post #7

If this can bring me a working * nix shell under Windows, I'd be extremely happy. Windows is great for everything except I have never learned PS as well as I know the * nix shells -- with this, I could enjoy the hardware and proper multi-monitor support, speed and stability (seriously) of Windows and use the * nix command line.

you seriously need to learn PS. I'm totally lovin' it.

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#28

Post by babuskov »

ryannevius wrote: post #11
sz4kerto wrote: post #7

If this can bring me a working * nix shell under Windows, I'd be extremely happy. Windows is great for everything except I have never learned PS as well as I know the * nix shells -- with this, I could enjoy the hardware and proper multi-monitor support, speed and stability (seriously) of Windows and use the * nix command line.

It's not quite the same...but Git Bash for Windows[1] is an awesome substitute for the Windows command prompt. [1] http://git-scm.com/downloads

AFAIK, that's actually MSYS. But since I need git anyway, I'm using exactly that, together with MinGW-w64 and it works quite well.

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#29

Post by babuskov »

cturner wrote: post #24

As cool as this is, a remaining problem I'd have for using Windows is that I've found git to be slow there. For example, the responsiveness of 'git status'. I'd guess this is something to do with NTFS being optimised for things different than unix-tradition filesystems. If so, this tool wouldn't improve that. Does anyone know more about this area?

Git is built for Linux and relies on some features of Linux filesystems for speed. As long as underlying filesystem is NTFS, there's no way to speed up Git.

Although, the "Support NTFS native hardlinks and emulated symbolic links" could be relevant if it does some magic there.

Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification

#30

Post by Surio »

This looks like an interesting project to keep an eye out for. On the topic of cygwin, I would also like to recommend mobaXterm, that I use instead of cygwin nowadays... It is an interesting choice in the alternatives we have. So, those of you that use cygwin, take a look at it here: http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

If you are thinking about trying cygwin, I would recommend this instead, as the installation is relatively easier when compared to cygwin. (I have no affiliation to mobaxterm)

Another new indispensible tool for me is cmder, which leverages ConEmu, clink and mysysgit to provide a wonderful UX in the commandline for me - just brilliant. Here: http://bliker.github.io/cmder/

Memo to self: Spend the next 4 months learning powershell during lunch breaks!

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