Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 149 posts

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

#81

Post by rudolf0 »

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.

Default Windows shell also has `findstr`, which works very similarly to grep. It's also quite fast.

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

#82

Post by towelguy »

emodendroket wrote: post #73
fijal wrote: post #34

This 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.

I remember from trying to use Linux on a desktop machine (and this was like a decade ago so maybe it's no longer relevant) that graphics drivers were often distributed only as binaries.

And I remember (from a decade ago as well) having to recompile my kernel to use those binary graphics drivers :)

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

#83

Post by Lambdanaut »

Maakuth wrote: post #46
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…

My biggest gripe with Cygwin (aside performance on some syscalls) has been package management, which used to require setup.exe to add or upgrade packages. That was nicely mitigated when I found out about apt-cyg[1]. It's a apt-getish frontend for setup.exe command line. Not as nice as real apt-get of course, but "apt-cyg install something" takes care of the most important use case. 1: https://github.com/transcode-ope…

It would also be really nice if Cygwin did a quick ping on all of the package hosts and then ordered them in order of least latency relative to you. Oftentimes I have to re-start the install process because I accidentally chose a host that's slow enough to delay the install for hours.

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

#84

Post by kbradero »

freehunter wrote: post #74
emodendroket wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cygwin is fine, but if you want to spend most of your time in bash or using software designed for Unix you probably shouldn't be using Windows in the first place.

Unless you need Windows just slightly more than you need Linux, or your hardware doesn't work properly under Linux, or you need software that Linux, even Wine, can't run. Or your processor isn't even capable of booting Linux, but it can run Windows (Intel Atom Bay Trail comes to mind). --edit apparently Bay Trail does support Linux. The big hype when it was launched was that it would not, that's where my confusion ca…

actually I'm pretty sure Bay Trail do run Linux.

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

#85

Post by homarp »

freehunter wrote: post #74
emodendroket wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cygwin is fine, but if you want to spend most of your time in bash or using software designed for Unix you probably shouldn't be using Windows in the first place.

Unless you need Windows just slightly more than you need Linux, or your hardware doesn't work properly under Linux, or you need software that Linux, even Wine, can't run. Or your processor isn't even capable of booting Linux, but it can run Windows (Intel Atom Bay Trail comes to mind). --edit apparently Bay Trail does support Linux. The big hype when it was launched was that it would not, that's where my confusion ca…

Linux runs on Bay Trail, e.g. https://www.happyassassin.net/fedlet-a-fedora-remix-for-bay-...

the problem was the 32 bit UEFI. Also solved: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/155557/installing-li...

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

#86

Post by gregschlom »

rbanffy wrote: post #52
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…

For me, Cygwin makes Windows bearable. It's still Windows, but, at least, it has a proper shell, interpreters, compilers, compressors (no need for WinZip or WinRAR - think about it!) and so on. For the same reason you need MacPorts or Brew on a Mac, you need Cygwin on Windows. Unless you are happy to spend your day in Visual Studio, in which case Cygwin will not be that useful.

>(no need for WinZip or WinRAR - think about it!)

I'd be surprised if compressor utilities running through Cygwin's emulation layer could achieve the same speed as a native tool. 7-zip is an open source tool that will handle all your compression / decompression needs on Windows (including rar, gz, many self-extracting exes, and a bunch of very exotic formats). You should really give it a try if you're compressing or decompressing large archives on Windows.

http://www.7-zip.org/

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

#87

Post by bkeroack »

superobserver wrote: post #80
rbanffy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It applies a Linux-like polish to a Windows machine. You can manipulate the whole Windows filesystem from within a Linux-like environment. With a VM you get a full Linux environment that cannot simply get to your Windows environment - you get a clear separation between the two. I like to say Cygwin "civilizes" Windows.

I agree. And when you add Chocolatey to the mix (just add it with an elevated cmd.exe as stated on chocolatey.org), you're about half-way to a GNU/Linux-ish Windows. (In elevated PowerShell, I actually used "choco install cygwin -y" after doing so!) I think in Windows 10 this is supposed to be even better with their OneGet framework that will be compatible with Choco. Things are looking better for those who have to u…

I believe MS wants you to use remote Powershell instead of SSH.

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

#88

Post by icebraining »

gtwy wrote: post #75

Does this support running X over SSH? The biggest drawback for me with Windows boxes was always a lack of X support for applications I want to run on remote servers.

In my limited experience, Xming worked fine for that use case.

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

#89

Post by Someone1234 »

rbanffy wrote: post #52
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…

For me, Cygwin makes Windows bearable. It's still Windows, but, at least, it has a proper shell, interpreters, compilers, compressors (no need for WinZip or WinRAR - think about it!) and so on. For the same reason you need MacPorts or Brew on a Mac, you need Cygwin on Windows. Unless you are happy to spend your day in Visual Studio, in which case Cygwin will not be that useful.

> WinZip or WinRAR

Everyone uses 7Zip now which has a very good command line version and is OSS/free (mostly LGPL licensed, but some of their source code is licenced otherwise because it is from third parties).

Plus Powershell can zip/unzip using the shell.application.Namespace API if you wish. I prefer 7zip myself, but Windows handles basic zip files fine.

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

#90

Post by Perseids »

gregschlom wrote: post #86
rbanffy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Cygwin makes Windows bearable. It's still Windows, but, at least, it has a proper shell, interpreters, compilers, compressors (no need for WinZip or WinRAR - think about it!) and so on. For the same reason you need MacPorts or Brew on a Mac, you need Cygwin on Windows. Unless you are happy to spend your day in Visual Studio, in which case Cygwin will not be that useful.

>(no need for WinZip or WinRAR - think about it!) I'd be surprised if compressor utilities running through Cygwin's emulation layer could achieve the same speed as a native tool. 7-zip is an open source tool that will handle all your compression / decompression needs on Windows (including rar, gz, many self-extracting exes, and a bunch of very exotic formats). You should really give it a try if you're compressing or…

> I'd be surprised if compressor utilities running through Cygwin's emulation layer could achieve the same speed as a native tool.

Why do you think so? The emulation layer should only be relevant for the IO part of the compressors and IO is usually severely limited by the harddisk anyway.

Post reply on HN