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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

#121

Post by Scarbutt »

vectorpush wrote: post #117
abalashov wrote: post #116

I admit that I am a bit lost as to the value of this endeavour, or Cygwin for that matter, in an era where just about all commodity hardware can sustain virtualisation. I used to have the problem of my dayjob requiring me to run Windows and use Outlook/Exchange, and Cygwin was a useful means of coping with that. But that was back in 2006. Now, it seems to me one should just fire up a Linux VM in VirtualBox, full-scre…

or Cygwin for that matter, in an era where just about all commodity hardware can sustain virtualisation. I use cygwin primarily as an ssh client for my local linux VMs. My IDE is vim/tmux/zsh, and I've found ssh via cygwin provides an experience that closely resembles gnome-terminal in appearance and behavior (gnome-terminal being the best terminal emulator around IMHO)

seems overkill, wouldn't just putty do in your case?

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

#122

Post by nocman »

emodendroket wrote: post #71
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.

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 your business requires software which only runs on Windows, and using cygwin allows you to do a lot of things better on Windows, and lets you do a lot of things cross platform that would be a waste of time to implement two ways.

I'd be more inclined to agree with you if you'd ended that statement with "... designed for Unix, perhaps you should consider whether you should be using Windows in the first place".

There are a lot of people out there that have to use Windows for a variety of reasons, but are glad to be able to do some shell-related things on it in a unix-like shell.

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

#123

Post by vectorpush »

Scarbutt wrote: post #121
vectorpush wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or Cygwin for that matter, in an era where just about all commodity hardware can sustain virtualisation. I use cygwin primarily as an ssh client for my local linux VMs. My IDE is vim/tmux/zsh, and I've found ssh via cygwin provides an experience that closely resembles gnome-terminal in appearance and behavior (gnome-terminal being the best terminal emulator around IMHO)

seems overkill, wouldn't just putty do in your case?

As I said, I prefer cygwin's look and feel to the alternatives. Also, cygwin supports transparent windows out of the box. I don't think it's overkill at all, the only package you need is ssh, everything else lives in the VM.

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

#124

Post by thiagowfx »

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 don't think it is fair to compare it with Arch packages in numbers. How many of these are really usable? Cygwin is a limited environment per se.

In this sense, it is better to compare msys2 with Arch packages, since msys2 uses pacman.

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

#125

Post by rbanffy »

pdpi wrote: post #92
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.

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.

On Cygwin, try MinTTY. The default cmd.exe console is horrendous. This is derived from PuTTY and much, much nicer.

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

#126

Post by jdboyd »

swah wrote: post #95
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 :(

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?

Installing ffmpeg and convert on Windows (without cygwin even) is trivial.

It looks like PowerShell even has kill (as an alias to Stop-Process) and ps (as an alias to Get-Process).

I don't like PowerShell, but I certainly wouldn't be quick to suggest that it is missing features.

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

#127

Post by alinspired »

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…

Couple apt-cyg with a batch script to install updates unattended - this made cygwin much nicer:

cd C:\distr\cygwin setup-x86_64.exe --no-desktop --no-shortcuts --no-startmenu --quiet-mode

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

#128

Post by jdboyd »

rbanffy wrote: post #125
pdpi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. On Cygwin, try MinTTY. The default cmd.exe console is horrendous. This is derived from PuTTY and much, much nicer.

You can even use MinTTY with cmd.exe (and probably powershell) for dramatically improved user experience.

And, you can also find MinTTY standalone separate from the burden of cygwin. I got it from the msys project.

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

#130

Post by malkia »

RDeckard wrote: post #112
malkia wrote: post #100

Wondering how well fork() works?

I was wondering the same thing. The features page claims "copy on write fork implementation" but that is not universally true. A cursory look at the code suggests that every allocation is a Win32 file mapping object (aka NT section) underneath, which the fork worker (mm_fork) remaps into the forked process. This means the memory is shared between two processes, and not in a CoW fashion. A write to the memory region f…

From little I've read on cygwin mailing list (btw, cool folks over there) - it seems the problem is not very easy. If I'm not mistaken the Windows Kernel actually does support fork()-ing, but the win32k system somehow "forbids" it (lots of grains of salt). After all for a long time there was a commercial UNIX compatible offering on Windows that probably used fork() all over and must've worked (also it supported case-sensitive names for the filesystem)

BTW, the coolest usage of fork(), and granted a pain in the ass to port possibly was the one in REDIS where antirez used it to fork() at certain time the current process, then write back the state of memory knowing that it'll get a "snapshot" of it, and if writes to disk succeed, this "snapshot" would correctly and fully be written to the disk.

I know there are plenty of other uses (for example this way "lua" can do threads with just a bit of a communication library on top... e.g. any language without explicit thread handling can actually use them).

Wondering what made win32k folks disable it. Possibly there are lots of gotchas...

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