What if Microsoft shipped "Linux for Windows"?
On Friday, Microsoft released a free download of Windows Services for Unix version 3.5, a significant upgrade to the Unix integration product they've been offering for about 5 years. I've used it before, mostly as an NFS client, but there's some remarkable changes this time around.
The Services for Unix (SFU) are free to download and consist of an entire Unix environment installed as a native subsystem on Windows. For those of you who don't know your Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 history, the NT kernel has always supported running multiple subsystems, and NT has always shipped with a Posix-compliant command-line subsystem, largely for checklist compatibility with some now-obsolete government requirements. Unlike tools like Cygwin, which run on top of the standard Windows shell, SFU implements the Interix subsystem as a true peer to the Windows shell.
But to that base SFU 3.5 adds some extraordinary new features. Both the Korn and C shells are included. A single rooted file system is now supported, finally abandoning the need to include drive paths in applications or scripts. And speaking of scripts, SFU includes Perl 5.6.1. There's even the full complement of standard Unix utilities, including awk, grep, sed, tr, cut, tar, cpio, less, at, cron and batch. Essential applications like bind, sendmail and ftp? Present. Even gcc, gdb, and make are in the package.
There's a lot of other stuff, of course, including the first tools to expose Windows' long-dormant file system support for junctions as symbolic links in the Interix environment. There's the above-mentioned NFS support. There's all kinds of user account synchronization features. A real version of telnet.
But what's most astounding, perhaps, is not the fact that I can now untar most perl scripts as-is and have them run on Windows. (I'll be testing out Movable Type shortly, of course.) What amazes me is that this product has slipped under the radar for so long. Any bets as to whether Longhorn includes this functionality out of the box? And It seems to me that this collection of functionality will rapidly allow Windows users to cover 90% of the things that OS X users are doing with Darwin. Interesting.
Wow! That was definitely unexpected. I’ve been a UNIX baby since the dawn of time (well my time anyway). Downloading it now…thanks for the news flash.
This isn’t exactly a new product at all. Microsoft seems to have revamped a product from a small company who’s name escapes me at the moment (but Interix sounds familiar) their claim to fame was a pretty nifty product called “OpenNT” (a subsystem that sat on top of the winNT posix subsystem) While the original product was pretty complete, it came with most of the source code, several xwindowing systems and a ton of tools and toys (about 4 cd’s worth) seems like MS has nicely trimmed it down which can be good and bad :(
-Justin
It’s definitely not a new product; I remember trying it out in 1999, right after MS had bought it. But making it free (it used to be hundreds of dollars, then $99, now free) and making it run as a native system instead of a hybrid on top of the Windows shell is a dramatic change.
Verry interresting. I’ll try it at home. But really, tell me what the beneficts if i have a double-OS PC (Windows XP and Mandrake 9.1) Is it really worth the carombolage? Have a nice day.
I’d seen it, but wasn’t sure if I needed it. Lately though I’ve been having so much trouble with getting source code to gcc make under Cygwin, I’ll give this a shot …
In case you’re considering installing, you’d better have Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 or Windows 2000 Server/Professional with Service Pack 3 or later.
(Windows Services for UNIX 3.5 does not work with Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows NT® Workstation, or Windows NT Server.)
Please bump Louis’s comment up to the main entry.
It’ll save a lot of people the pain on downloading and unzipping such a huge file.
I envy those who know coding and all the good stuff I intent to eventually learn. This quote is not that surprising when you think about it.
“What amazes me is that this product has slipped under the radar for so long.”
Those who like open source will probably have closed ears to any possitive news about MicroSoft. In addition MicroSoft is viewed as inherantly evil (see upcomming court case(s)), so its not an easy message to spread to say that they are comming out with good products
This is interesting and will hopefully allow a few Windows users to expand their horizons. For those of us who feel more at home using UNIX though it seems kinda silly… Like running Linux on VMWare on Windows! Or perhaps adding a second, brick floor to a thatched hut! Just use Linux or Darwin for chrissakes!
Anil, do you know how it works with MT? I am, of course, downloading as I type, and have already my MT here to try (the eternal hopeful project). If you have any comments regarding its interaction with your MT, those will be highly appreciated.
Re: open source and Microsoft (aaron)
Nowhere does it read that Microsoft’s SFU is released under an opensource license. It’s just a free download. So is MSIE, and so is Movable Type, yet neither of the two are opensource apps.
Anyone know if these exploits (from securityfocus.com) are fixed?
Michel:
Well, you can view the source code to MT and modify it to suit your needs. If not “open source” by a purist definition (are you sure you’re not mixing up “open source” and “free software”?) Those are certainly two important steps in the direction of open source.
Way better than nothing, IMHO.
Joe
SFU itself is not under an “open source license” but most of the tools are Free Software, indeed many of them came from the GNU project.
No-one, including Microsoft, can compete with Free Software’s economics. So when it comes to areas where they don’t already have a strong offering, Microsoft has no choice but to go with Free Software. What’s vitally important for them is that the customers never realise this. The moment a large corporation says “Hey, this SFU addon which we need for migration is identical to the stuff you told us was dangerous and made by hippies” the game is up and Microsoft can wave good bye to multi-billion dollar profits.
So you can expect a fresh wave of anti-FSF propaganda from Redmond any day now, even as their engineers download updates from ftp.gnu.org
Sound just like m$, anything to try to keep people using their product. They may be able to run a unix subsystem but the kernal will still be m$.
I’ve just recently become completely independant of m$, I work on a mac and a linux box handles all my server needs. Addmintting that it is more difficult to get going than and m$ system, in the end its solid and stays working.
Sound just like m$, anything to try to keep people using their product. They may be able to run a unix subsystem but the kernal will still be m$.
I’ve just recently become completely independant of m$, I work on a mac and a linux box handles all my server needs. Addmintting that it is more difficult to get going than and m$ system, in the end its solid and stays working.
I’ve been running this to sync up my Windows accounts with my unix systems for a while now. Whenever a password is changed on the linux server, it’s replicated to Win. Pretty slick.
I’m sorry but anyone who spells microsoft with a $ clearly doesnt know what they are talking about. I see you have trouble spelling a lot of other words too. Just because a piece of software is free doesnt mean its cheaper to run than its commercially produced competitor. Admittedly i’ve only recently started to get to grips withs unix (under the duress of course administrators and their pointless old parallel programming languages) but i still find the windows environment faster and easier to use. If this thing lets me use the unix tools i have to use without suffering unix itself it sounds great.
This could become quite compelling if someone creates a ports system for SFU (like Darwin’s Fink) and begins moving over free software to the platform.
I just tried this out. I’m not a system admin or anything. It might be wonderful for some people, but if you just write code and use mostly client programs, WSFU sucks. No tab completion and when you hit the up arrow key, it just beeps at you. Cygwin is much better.
dave, just customize your .profile (ksh) or .cshrc (csh) to use the appropriate editing modes for tab completion or history access.
In ksh, you probably want: set -o emacs bind ‘^I’=complete
Oh, and if you want bash (as well as other tools) for SFU, go here: http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/warehouse.htm
Weird. Now I regret that I’m running winXP home, having a full unix environment might make running LaTeX much easier. The port to Windows is pretty good, but it would be easier still if …
Hi Anil, Any luck yet on Movable Type under SFU?
This crazy korn shell moves us back to 10 years ago. So do set -o emacs and then download latest pkg-1.2-??-bin35.h from www.interopsystems.com in order to get bash. But download it on / not of “My documents” because the script doesn’t know how to handle white spaces in file names. Then you can launch “sh pkg-1.2-??-bin35.sh” . It will install pkg_add .
But you need to be Administrator to use it. So simply type su (and your password) and you will get Administrator privileges (root for Linux) . Then you can download and install directly with command pkg_add ftp://www.interopsystems.com/pkgs/3.5/bash-2.05.2.1-bin.tgz
Then you can try bash: bash-2.05$ and bash-2.05$ pkg_add ftp://www.interopsystems.com/pkgs/3.5/openssh-3.7.1.4-bin.tgz and you will get ssh, the trusted telnet.
The ssh server is not here but the client only. rsync -e ssh (trusted ftp and better) is not here too. As well as any X server.
So you can’t try to really work on Unix and need to download Xfree86 for windows (never tried).
If pkg_add is better than any windows installer it is still no as good as “urpmi ssh” that you can get on Mandrake 9.2 because you don’t need to specify the ftp server neither the exact name of the package (the exact name of the pkg shell was not updated on their web page).
So cygwin is still to be preferred today no? gcc -mnocygin gives you windows executable too.
I will reboot my laptop on Linux and use win4lin if I really need to run a windows software on Linux (the opposite solution). But it is true that win4lin is commercial and works only on win9x Windows versions (which are supported by Microsoft for 2 additional years I have heard [win98]). And I don’t know what the future will be and keep the opportunity to use SFU in the future. But I am quite sure that Linux is now spreading and will spread mostly because of OpenOffice and Ximian Evolution (Outlook clone).
At last “Solutions Linux” exhibition in Paris yesterday (where I got SFU free CD-ROM from Microsoft people [who were there!]) I was impressed by the vitality and diversity of people.
We gave the LiveCD of Knoppix 3.3 to Richard Stallman who was very satisfied with this first non-proprietary GNU/Linux livecd. Former Knoppix LiveCDs contained some proprietary compiled objects. You can also have a look at PCLinuxOS (Mandrake 9.2 based) LiveCD which is even more usable than Knoppix 3.3 (Debian based) but contains proprietary objects too.
Last word for people using both systems Windows and Unix: LiveCD let you use GNU/Linux on a computer without using its hard disk. You should boot on the CD (default Bios setting) and your RAM memory (256Mb or more) is enough to build a complete working sytem. So in a few minutes, you can access to Google, play music, look at powerpoint presentations, access MSN messenger (afer setting you username and password in gaim) or exploring your windows LAN (type smb:/// on the explorer). So it will work even if your desktop or laptop is working on Windows because it will not touch your hard disk. You can stop the process at any time because every thing is in RAM (volatile memory). Once your are convinced to use GNU/Linux you should install a true distribution among which Mandrake is probably one of the easiest and safest distribution to repartition your hard disk (in order to keep a dual boot Windows/Linux).
Cheers,
Nbrouard, MS Services for UNIX is obviously aimed at UNIX users (e.g. who might be thinking of moving from RISC systems running Solaris, AIX, etc. to x86), and not at Linux users. In fact, the SFU layout (APIs, file tree layout, etc.) is closer to other UNIX systems than Linux is, so ex-UNIX users might even feel more at home on Windows/SFU than on Linux.
In the UNIX world, ksh is a major shell (bash has copied many, but not all, of its features), and many of us prefer it to imitative shells that make annoying assumptions (e.g. bash assumes everyone wants emacs keybindings by default, where as a lot of us like vi; ksh makes no assumptions, so the user can learn about the available keybindings and then choose among them).
It´s a pity Services for UNIX includes the `Public Domain Korn Shell´ (pdksh), which is a clone of the old Korn Shell (ksh88), and not the real Korn Shell (ksh93). I suspect there may be some licensing reason, since AT&T U/WIN (which is not free for commercial use, and runs on top of Win32) offers ksh93 on Win32. It´s nevertheless unfortunate, but at least it isn´t bash.
Microsoft orginally had a unix. They sold it awhile back. From my understanding most apps can be compiled on SFU since you will have the tools at your disposal. As for Microsoft’s strategy, let the *nix users migrate to the “better” operating system. Me personally, I will stick with FreeBSD and Linux on my servers. They have proven their stability and performance, especially on lower end machines. Another tidbit, I’d have to go digging, but I recall hearing that the nt kernel has its base in Tru64 unix. SFU is great for somethings though. SSHD for one. I love being able to use unix commands on windows since I am stuck using it for work.