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Ubuntu on Windows

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Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#911

Post by JdeBP »

david-given wrote: post #151
zymhan wrote: post #4

"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"." I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on yo…

So, uh. I did this! Crudely. In 2010. http://cowlark.com/lbw/ It's a Linux syscall translator for Windows. It works well enough to run a Debian userland, although it's got so many holes and rough edges that I would never, ever, ever suggest using it for anything other than a stunt. It uses Interix to do most of the heavy lifting, so all LBW does is to translate from Linux syscalls to Interix syscalls; so we get a Uni…

Given that Interix is not being brought back from the dead ...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11391841

... would you agree with a call for it to be?

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#912

Post by JdeBP »

80x25 wrote: post #129

"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.

The reason why they don't work was actually on-screen, very briefly until Russ Alexander cleared it (again), in the Microsoft demo video. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415843 .

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#913

Post by JdeBP »

jeena wrote: post #456
twic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are programs which are included in the Ubuntu distribution.

And OS X, and BSD, and OS2 and AmigaOS and probably one million other OSses.

Strictly speaking: none of those commands were "included in the distribution" when it came to OS/2. There were of course ports of those commands to OS/2, which one could install. But none of those came in the box.

I believe that that was also true for AmigaDOS, even the post-Commodore versions, but I don't have the firsthand knowledge to state it unequivocally.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#914

Post by JdeBP »

rspeer wrote: post #177
80x25 wrote: post #129

"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.

It sounds like this would involve tweaking conhost.exe so that it understands all the vt100 sequences, as well as UTF-8. (I hope they wouldn't assume everyone's tmux setup uses only characters from codepage 437.) If they did that, it would also fix the awfulness of Python's stdout on Windows!

> I hope they wouldn't assume everyone's tmux setup uses only characters from codepage 437.

I hope that people here aren't assuming that terminals are all VT100 clones. (-:

The old (Interix) Windows NT POSIX subsystem added escape sequence recognition to Windows consoles when POSIX programs were using them as their terminal output. Such terminals match up with an "Interix" terminal type in the termcap and terminfo databases. Their escape sequence set is not the same as any DEC VT type.

The Dickey ncurses termcap database has an "interix|opennt|ntconsole" entry, although I have encountered systems with ncurses but without this termcap entry and had to add it myself. It is, apparently, wrong. David Given has a different one in LBW.

* https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb463194.aspx

* http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/colored-terminfo.src.htm...

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-GB/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

* https://github.com/sedwards/lbw/blob/master/extras/interix.t...

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#915

Post by JdeBP »

homulilly wrote: post #394

Is this still going to be using the absolutely dreadfull conhost? Because that's the biggest shortcoming windows currently has with its interactive command line tools, cmd.exe and powershell are both usable, not great (okay, pretty bad honestly, but usable) when you don't consider the shitty terminal they force you into using.

Maybe you should try Take Command. I've been using it for years. It re-displays Win32 consoles in its own tabbed user interface. It provides its own command interpreter (with all sorts of extra stuff), but one can also use it for Microsoft's command interpreter, Bourne Again shell, Z shell, PowerShell, and so forth.

* https://jpsoft.com/

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#916

Post by JdeBP »

sveiss wrote: post #428
homulilly wrote: post #394

Is this still going to be using the absolutely dreadfull conhost? Because that's the biggest shortcoming windows currently has with its interactive command line tools, cmd.exe and powershell are both usable, not great (okay, pretty bad honestly, but usable) when you don't consider the shitty terminal they force you into using.

Hopefully they'll include emulation for ptys, which will make it very easy for you to run your terminal emulator of choice instead of relying on on conhost. If they're smart, they'll allow a Linux ABI exe to sit on one end of a pty, and Win32/UWP exe on the other, so people can use a native Windows terminal emulator instead of needing Xming or similar.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415843 .

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#917

Post by JdeBP »

justncase80 wrote: post #154

This is great. For the last couple of years, as a windows user, I have just been installing Git Scm, which includes something similar to this and have been using that for all script / command line needs. If this was baked into Windows so much the better! I would love it if nobody ever wrote a single CMD or PS1 file ever again. Let's please all just converge on bash and put this debate behind us.

> Let's please all just converge on bash

As (I hope most) Unix/Linux users would respond: let's not.

A good thing about the Unix/Linux world is that there is a multiplicity of shells. And this is regularly taken advantage of. I have systems (for example) where my interactive shell is the Z shell and /bin/sh is the Almquist shell. I have others where /bin/sh is the Korn shell.

The "Shellshock" incident should have told everyone that Bourne Again shell everywhere, for everything, is not a good idea.

In any case, this is not a debate to be won/lost in the first place, as I hope Unix/Linux users would also respond. There are places for shell scripts, places for Python, places for perl, places for awk, TCL, REXX, execlineb, and a whole lot of others. One size, one scripting language, does not fit all.

Indeed, if you do eventually gain all the Ubuntu command-line toolsets from this, your options should broaden to those and more besides, not narrow to the Bourne Again shell.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#918

Post by JdeBP »

zeveb wrote: post #381
tostitos1979 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been "stuck" with a 2010 Macbook since Apple isn't refreshing it's laptop hardware soon enough. Plus I'm sick of soldered in RAM and other BS. For devs that do heavy Linux work (but have stuck with a Mac OS for GUI/app reasons), is it time to move (back) to Windows? If so, what would be a good laptop to get at the moment?

> For devs that do heavy Linux work (but have stuck with a Mac OS for GUI/app reasons), is it time to move (back) to Windows? Why not just use Linux? It has a GUI. It has apps. It does everything a modern desktop or laptop needs to do. It really is great.

With UbuntuBSD (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326681) the equivalent question is "Why not just use PC-BSD?"

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#919

Post by JdeBP »

NateDad wrote: post #318

Given that I work on a cross platform application for linux & windows... I'll be interested to see if they try to hide some of the more annoying platform compatibility problems.... like the fact that many linux applications assume you can rename/delete a file while it's still open, and windows won't let you. Also filesystem ACLs are quite different on linux and windows, it'll be interesting to see exactly how the one…

> windows won't let you

This is a common misconception. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415366 .

> filesystem ACLs are quite different on linux and windows

It's not that simple. Filesystem ACLs are different between TRUSIX-style and NFS-style, too. Try using a TRUSIX-style setfacl on PC-BSD when the volume has been mounted with NFS-style ACLs, some time. (-:

> What will chown and chmod do?

One thing that was noticeable from Microsoft's demonstration video was that everything seemed to be owned by the superuser and have execute permissions. That included a .gitignore and a README.md file.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#920

Post by JdeBP »

dcw303 wrote: post #507

This is good news for developers with Macs, and it has nothing to do with an option to switch platforms. By doing this, Microsoft are legitimising bash as an OS feature for "developers who like unix". This has two effects on Apple: 1. It means they will be less likely to remove their bash CLI from a future OSX / iOS hybrid workstation OS nightmare that we all don't like to think about. 2. They will have to compete wi…

> Microsoft are legitimising bash as an OS feature for "developers who like unix".

You are imputing far too much power to Microsoft. It's Linux operating systems that have "legitimized" the Bourne Again shell as an operating system feature, long since and with more clout than Microsoft could wield in this regard.

As such, if Apple can stand up to the "pressure" from a quarter of a century of Linux operating systems, several of which are no longer "bash everywhere" in any case, it can stand up to any pressure that the Windows NT Linux subsystem could possibly exert.

Anyway, "developers who like Unix" hopefully also like its long-standing notion, going back to the 1970s, that there is not only one shell. Thompson, Bourne, Almquist, C, TENEX C, Korn 88, Korn 93, MirBSD Korn, Bourne Again, Z, Debian Policy-compliant, Debian Almquist, Friendly Interactive, Yet Another, ....

Given that this new subsystem is touted as giving developers the means to run Ubuntu toolsets, it behooves us all to look and see what Ubuntu (14.04, the same as in the demo video) actually has when it comes to shells:

* http://packages.ubuntu.com/hu/trusty/shells/

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