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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

#92
post #52
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.

Windows has had a proper shell for a while now, in the form of PowerShell. It's quite different from the standard Unix shell, and I'm nowhere near as productive in it as I am in Bash, but that's more a function of lack of familiarity than any weaknesses of the shell. In fact, I'd say that it's actually much nicer than unix-y shells for a wide variety of tasks.

All I really find missing these days is good line-editing, and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

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

#93
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you can run this, you can run VirtualBox, which is a much safer alternative (and simpler, if a live ISO meets your needs).

But not equivalent for some use cases. Like, say I want to use 'find' (not windows find.exe) to find files on a Windows filesystem.

What I typically miss on Windows is "rsync".

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

#94
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…

Cygwin should only slow down syscalls. Syscalls should not be a significant fraction of the running time of compression software.

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

#95
post #14
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 :(

Buts its not just the shell, its ps, kill, convert, ffmpeg... do you feel like you can do most stuff you do on linux in PS?

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

#96
post #30

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 relativel…

The big problem with MobaTerm is that it includes really old versions of the standard unix utilities, and it's difficult to integrate with newer & missing utilities. This isn't a problem that's limited to MobaXTerm, but the way MobaXTerm does things makes it harder to fix. Let's say you want to set up a standard dev setup. So you install MobaXTerm, vagrant, emacs, msysgit, and rsync. Each of these require SSH for ful…

I agree with your point on the very clumsy SSH tack-on take up with this approach.

About the older utilities, again, I completely agree. But, the way to create the mx3 bundles is easy. Actually, on the website/forums, several users there have been a few 3rd party utilities of the same. The format is transparent for anyone to create their own set of utilities on top of what mobs provides.

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

#98
post #92
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.

Windows has had a proper shell for a while now, in the form of PowerShell. It's quite different from the standard Unix shell, and I'm nowhere near as productive in it as I am in Bash, but that's more a function of lack of familiarity than any weaknesses of the shell. In fact, I'd say that it's actually much nicer than unix-y shells for a wide variety of tasks. All I really find missing these days is good line-editing…

Do you know how to echo text in ASCII or UTF-8? > "text" or > echo "text" For me both come out with weird character encoding

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

#99
post #92
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.

Windows has had a proper shell for a while now, in the form of PowerShell. It's quite different from the standard Unix shell, and I'm nowhere near as productive in it as I am in Bash, but that's more a function of lack of familiarity than any weaknesses of the shell. In fact, I'd say that it's actually much nicer than unix-y shells for a wide variety of tasks. All I really find missing these days is good line-editing…

> All I really find missing these days is good line-editing

Probably familiar enough for bash people:

https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine

> and a half-decent terminal emulator in which to run the shell.

Not a terminal emulator (although I think it can do Terminal escape sequences if needed):

https://github.com/Maximus5/ConEmu

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