I don't understand what this is supposed to accomplish. What's the advantage of building on GNU/Linux and running on Windows compared to building on Windows and running on Windows? Seems like it's needlessly complicating things making a binary compatibility layer.
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
#32Cygwin 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…
For me I've had too many problems with cygwin and $DAYJOB installs BLODA, so I'm really interested to see what comes of this, also since it uses arch and pacman, which are my distro of choice, it sounds pretty perfect to me! (no more having to recompile everything from source with cygwin or `rebaseall` and suchlike)
Hmm, Have you looked at http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ before. I found this less of a hassle to install and work with, than cygwin.
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#33I don't understand what this is supposed to accomplish. What's the advantage of building on GNU/Linux and running on Windows compared to building on Windows and running on Windows? Seems like it's needlessly complicating things making a binary compatibility layer.
For people who are required to have a machine that boots into windows because of corporate policies at work maybe?
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#34This is quite funny, since you can't run unmodified linux binaries on other linuxes (that is a binary distribution on linux is generally not a thing and there will always be a distribution that does stuff just differently enough), so a recompilation on windows sounds like as good of a solution.
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#35This has been tried before as the author notes. E.g.
Previous experiments have stumbled on Linux usage of %gs and other segmentation issues.
The present project is possibly trying to overcome those obstacles with dynamic recompilation. It's in very early stages though.
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#36I don't understand what this is supposed to accomplish. What's the advantage of building on GNU/Linux and running on Windows compared to building on Windows and running on Windows? Seems like it's needlessly complicating things making a binary compatibility layer.
It's trying to accomplish exactly the same as Wine, only vice versa.
There is a considerable amount of software written and compiled for Linux that is not available on Windows.
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#37Cool. CoLinux does something similar
I thought it's been dead for ages
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#38Very impressive. I'd appreciate if they could get WINE working under this though..... :-)
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#39Earlier 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.
I use `where` for finding stuff, but that's based on structure rather than scraping.
Re: Foreign Linux: Run Linux binaries on Windows without drivers or modification
#40As 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.
> Git [...] relies on some features of Linux filesystems for speed.
Modern NTFS versions support all the things that git needs, so it has less to do with having magical features in Linux filesystems per se and more with the fact that they aren't properly mapped onto respective NTFS features in the abstraction layer (MSYS or similar).