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

Ubuntu on Windows

blog.dustinkirkland.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 933 posts

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#121

Post by quotemstr »

tlrobinson wrote: post #38
xaduha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that you need a terminal program (like putty or iTerm2 on OS X for example) to get all the benefits.

He says it mostly works in cmd.exe, and they're working on getting things like screen/tmux working too. If a fully-compatible terminal emulator doesn't exist yet (I have no idea) I bet there will be one within a year.

conhost (the black box that typically runs cmd.exe) is a terribly shitty terminal emulator. My biggest gripe with Windows has been the lack of a decent pseudoconsome system that would allow an ecosystem of terminal emulators to developer, as one has for POSIX-ish systems.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#122

Post by abritishguy »

sabarn01 wrote: post #23
abritishguy wrote: post #19

I wonder how buggy thus is. For example, how do symlinks work given windows doesn't have an equivalent that behaves the same.

Windows does have symlinks and hardlinks that work very similarly but are only exposed via a built in cmd command. That said no one uses them.

I know but the semantics are different.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#125

Post by verytrivial »

I remember seeing an ad for an PowerBook (oh, this first one one: http://xaharts.org/funny/Apple_Mac_OS_X_Unix_ad.html ) back in 2002 (apparently) and thinking: "Wow, now I want one." Outstanding pitch. And for the last decade and a half so have a huge number busy engineers, scientists and most recently and profoundly, web developers. Microsoft is making a very smart move here, even if it is exceedingly late.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#126

Post by TillE »

vram22 wrote: post #108
digi_owl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats why you do it clean room style. One team to document, one team to implement based on that document.

What does "clean room" style mean, exactly? I've heard the term, but only in connection with semiconductor factories, I think. You're talking about software here.

To avoid any hint of copyright infringement, a team reimplementing an API (or similar) must never have looked at the original code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#127

Post by tdicola »

frozenport wrote: post #60

I don't get it. What's the use case for a few core utilities running natively?

I'm with you. Interesting novelty, but I would absolutely not bank on doing anything missions critical with this. Wait 5 years for the excitement to die down and lets see if the team stuck maintaining this is even going to be around anymore. Are they committing to keeping the syscall translation layer up to date with changes in later kernels, etc? Or is this going to turn into another 'You can run Android apps on Windows!' announcement that fizzles out after they realize how much work they've gotten into...

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#128

Post by mmebane »

drinchev wrote: post #81
mmebane wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems they are taking the same route as cygwin by "mounting" windows drives in /mnt/c (or /cygdrive/c). I wonder if this Unix filesystem layer will be able to break the Windows legacy path length limit. If so, the Linux version of Node.js will suddenly become much more useful than the Windows version. > It remains to be seen if this is better (more performant) or worse Sounds like performance, at least, will be…

Just a remark. npm's team fixed long paths in v3.0, so now you have "flat tree".

The "maximally flat" package structure in npm 3 solves the problem in most common cases, so I suppose "much more useful" was an exaggeration - if you keep your code in a relatively short base directory such as C:\src\nodeprojects\left-pad-ng\, you'll probably be fine.

Depending on what version ranges dependencies are locked to, you could still end up with a pathological situation which breaks the path length limit, but I've only had that happen once since switching to npm 3, and it was easy to resolve.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#129

Post by 80x25 »

"But there are some imperfections still, especially around tty's an the vt100. My beloved byobu, screen, and tmux don't quite work yet, but they're getting close!"

If they actually fix these imperfections, that would be fantastic. It would address a number issues that are "unfixable" in Cygwin flavors of utilities/apps.

Post reply on HN