Slashdot Mirror

Like you can already with VMWare (fantasic app imho, tested 3 Linux distrubtions and FreeBSD without partitioning, or risking any of my data)
or get all you beed of a UNIX-a-like from Cygwin.

This is one of the things that gets me about Windows people sometimes. They don't realize that things exist outside of redmond.

Last time I checked, anything older than MacOS 10 is obsolete. Since Mac OS =>10 is pretty much unix, we now have platform independance. X is available on all those platforms now.

Gcc is good, open, and could use some work, so please think about helping out. My favorite is MinGW which is a really nice and decently maintained Win32 version of gcc and binutils. MinGW also distributes MSYS which is a bash shell and other gnu utilities that make a windows box capable of running a Linux configure script. This allows much easier porting of GNU applications to windows and vice versa. There are several GUI compilers based on MinGW too, see the web page FAQ. A nice GUI GCC based compiler for Win32 is Bloodshed Dev-C++, which I've used.

Cygwin is good too but I prefer MinGW (obviously).

So think about helping out, our tools will only get better if folks work on them.

Erm cron for windows, and what about cygwin?

I've used it for awhile. It basically has 3 parts: NFS (client and server), korn shell (and really basic utils), and Perl. (It also has a revamped telnet server, but so what?) The NFS stuff is... well, NFS. I hate NFS. (For some reason, I keep getting it cocked up such that I need a reboot.) The shell is worthless. The Perl is ActiveState's version, and you can get that for free anyway.

If you really want to put a bunch of Unix tools on Windows, you ought to look at CygWin. I've tested it only briefly, and it's even got an X server. In that regard, it's pretty cool. You can load what bits you want and leave the rest out.

The problem with putting Unix tools on Windows is that it's still Windows. I'm not trying to be funny here. The main advantage of having a shell is being able to administrate the system under which the shell is running. While it might be nice to do some awk'ing and sed'ing natively under Windows, you still can't do a whole lot of administration with it. Let's face it, for more than a few lines of shell script, Perl's a better way to go these days. At that point, what's the use of spending money on this product? NFS? Just put samba on your NFS servers instead and quit fooling around with the clients.

Ever heard of Cygwin ?

The GPL utility source code for Services for UNIX 3.0 contains the base utilities diff, sdiff, bc, dc, cpio, gzip, gunzip, gawk, patch, csplit, nl, strings, rpm, and SDK utilities/libraries ld.so, gcc, gdb, g++, g77, gasp, objcopy, ld, as, ar, nm, size, strip, ci, co, diff3 rcs, rlog, and ident.

No need to turn to MS for this. You want Cygwin for this. XFree under Cygwin now supports rootless mode, making it very feasible to use native apps and X11 apps at the same time.

Works very well.

I think there are two reasons why people avoid X solutions:

1. They don't have a UNIX environment on the dekstops.

2. They don't know how to properly use X.

In the first case, I would recommend Cygwin's XFree86 Test servers for Windows. One of the latest builds allows rootless mode on a Windows desktop which would make the browser appear to run on the user's desktop. Combined with a theme that resembles Luna or the original Win2K look, the clients shouldn't be able to tell the difference.

The second problem is a little harder to deal with. Unfortunately, X is a little confusing for people not entires familiar with it. The fact that the "server" runs on the client end and the "clients" run on the server end is a very odd proposition. A lot of people also don't seem to be aware of the possibilities of remote execution with X. There is a lot of talk about it, but I don't think people use it in creative ways because they don't understand how to do that.

For this mozilla deployment, X is a natural since it allows for easy centralized management instead of running to each desktop. It's more secure since you can control access to the application servers and the users have no ability to reconfigure the browser since they only have access to the browser on the server and no editing tools. Even better is carrying all this over SSH. The traffic is encrypted and can be compressed. Making this VERY transparent to the user is extremely easy. But you will have to understand X first, which is understanably confusing to a lot of people. It took me a good two years to really understand and start using the power of X.

Install CygWin, open a bash terminal, and 'cd /cygdrive/c/winnt ; ls -l'...

Feels just like home. You can even install sshd, use an rsakey, and do it remotely.

Seriously, though. If you are looking for backup utilities, NONAGS has several that might be useful for spanning your disks. I personally use Polder Backup onto a separate drive, backing up only those things which I can't replace (photos, text documents, and music). You could also use CYGWIN to zip / tar your entire drive, then use Chokkin Pettan to segment into CD-sized bites. From personal experience I can tell you that programs other than CYGWIN choke on 5 GB+ files. Maybe a backup drive is in order?

Rerun Cygwin's setup.exe, expand the XFree86 category in the package selection window, then select version 4.2.0-20 of the XFree86-xserv package. Next, edit your startup script (typically startxwin.bat), removing any window manager (mwm, twm, etc.) and adding the -multiwindow parameter to XWin.exe. Be sure to remove the -rootless and -fullscreen parameters if you are using them. Also, multiwindow mode chokes if you use the ``run'' utility on some programs, so try removing any program startup lines that use run if you have problems.

Oh yeah, and last night I hacked together a first implementation of the X Shape Extension for the MultiWindow mode. Here is a screenshot of the X Shape Extension (notice the shape of the xeyes and oclock windows).

Damn link was broken:

Screenshot

I liked this the first time... when it was called Cygwin.

For those whou don't know, Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts: (1) A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality. (2) A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel. The Cygwin DLL works with all non-beta, non "release candidate", ix86 versions of Windows since Windows 95, with the exception of Windows CE.

Other thing which I'd suggest for anyone who is unfortunate enough to work under Microsoft Windows is Perl Power Tools: The Unix Reconstruction Project. The goal is quite simply to reimplement the classic Unix command set in pure Perl, and to have as much fun as we can doing so. See the command list.

(I post as AC, because I'm not a Karma whore or anything like that.)

Let me respond to your posting and try to work out a list of sites. As you say, gnusoftware.org is down and has been for quite some time. The links on opensource.org aren't a great deal of use but I did find O'Reilly OSDir's Windows section with 18 apps listed, and BerliOS's Windows category with 11 projects. OSSBlacksheep is just a CD you can buy with some free software for Windows - similar to some mentioned on Slashdot recently.

More useful than these is the old favourite Cygwin, a Unix-on-Win32 layer with gcc and tools, and its offshoot Mingw (aka Ming, Mingw32, Minimalist GNU-Win32) which is a native gcc and toolchain, without a Unix emulation layer. You can use Cygwin to port lots of Unix apps, and you can use Mingw to build the Win32 ports of things like perl and Mozilla. Actually I don't think you need both since Cygwin's gcc can build native executables too, but Mingw is slightly 'cleaner' if you have no need for emulated symlinks and other cruft.

Hmm, what else can I think of? Well a lot of the big applications like Emacs and Mozilla have native Win32 ports. Don't forget the old DOS stuff, DJGPP which is a GNU-based development environment for DOS - everything except fork()!. There used to be a rival called EMX but it seems to have faded away.

You're right that allowing Windows free software on Freshmeat but not Windows proprietary software is something of a double standard; but then so is allowing PalmOS (a wholly proprietary platform and not Unix). I don't think anyone expects Freshmeat to hold to a particular set of principles, it's above all a practical and useful site. So allowing Windows software but only when it is free might be a pragmatic compromise.

Maybe one day, one of the Freshmeat staff will be forced to use a Windows box for a few months, and then I'd expect a Windows section to appear pretty rapidly :-).

I feel cygwin is
one of the best products in the RH stable.

the purchase of cygnus was a great move.

-greg

For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

A few weeks ago, I wrote Microsoft Mac FUD, Phooey, complaining about Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit head Kevin Browne's comments on the eve of Macworld.

This is such a despicable tactic. Microsoft embraced Apple and gave them funding at the height of the antitrust investigation, as a way of sustaining the idea that there was still competition in the market. Now that Apple's back on their feet, and OS X is giving them a run for the money, they pull out of the market. This decision may end up as badly for Microsoft's Office division as Lotus' decision to skip Windows.

Hackers and "alpha geeks" push the envelope, start to use the new technology, and get more out of their systems long before ordinary users even know what's possible.

A good example that's still a bit far out, but that I'm confident is significant. I held a summit of peer-to-peer networking developers, and when we were sitting around having a beer afterwards, a young FreeNet developer said to Kevin Lenzo (who was there because of his early work on IRC infobots): "You sound familiar."

Kevin mentioned that he was the developer of festvox, an open source speech synthesis package, and that he was the source of one of the voices distributed with the package. "Oh, that's why. I listen to you all the time. I pipe IRC to festival so I can listen to it in the background when I'm coding."

Now I'll guarantee that lots of people will routinely be converting text to speech in a few years, and I know it because the hackers are already doing it. It's been possible for a long time, but now it's ripening toward the mainstream.

" ... I know several who have started using Darwin on Intel hardware as there[sic] Unix underpinnings of choice ... "

Todd Hoff writes:

I'm a Windows-only user and I plan to switch to the Mac on my next purchase because of XP's DRM approach. Using XP would be like voluntarily entering a jail cell and closing the door.

From an interface perspective, I don't find the Mac superior.

Amen to your DRM concerns. Apple has been relatively more enlightened on the subject of DRM, recognizing that most users are fundamentally honest, and unwilling to support the extreme position of fear-mongering media executives.

When industry gets handed lemons on this scale, it has no choice but to turn them into marketing. A common reckoning is that one-third of software is used illegally, but not every theft represents a lost sale. If economic theory has any claim on the real world, Microsoft's pricing should naturally gravitate toward producing an optimum amount of theft. That is, thieves who wouldn't use the product if they had to pay for it, but who might become future customers or who become part of a network of users that makes the software more valuable to legitimate buyers.
...
A sore subject at its antitrust trial, for instance, was Microsoft's practice of awarding large discounts to computer makers who bought a Windows license for every machine they shipped, whether or not Windows was actually loaded. This was supposed to be proof of monopolistic intent, but the only real competitor for Windows is a Windows bootleg. Microsoft's pricing strategy was designed to induce customers not to steal.
...
The entertainment industry is still getting used to the idea that anybody who wants to take the trouble can get its products for free. But as Microsoft has been showing for years, that's no excuse for not making bundles of money.

I've been unimpressed with all the Linux books for newbies. The expert books are great but if your new to Linux they are also useless.
I've not looked at Linux for Dumbies and I have over all been impressed with the dumbies books.
The best by far was a booklet made by SCO for Xenix. This is obveously out of print but it was a mini refence.

Probably the best thing is time in the trenches. For exsisting Mac Os X and Linux users thats call up the shell and experement.
For Windows users however that's not so easy. But it can be done...
Msys is a Unix environment targeted at Windows software develupment.
Software dev is easyer from the Unix shell what can I say?

It's very Unix but still running under Windows. Just an app. Not a scary install like Linux as it dosen't threaton to destroy everything in favor of the new os...
(Think of an Os install as the Genisis torpedo from Star Trek II.)
Spock "It would destroy such life in favor of it's new matrix"
In otherwords Installing Linux means never being able to go back to Windows (the old matrix).
All your data is gone.. everything...
Your not just trying Linux your commiting to it.
New users need some asurence that Linux is the way to go.

If they can learn Linux from the safe confines of having never installed it so much the better.
Cygwin is annother Unix environment again for software develupment.

Add a good Linux or Unix newbie book and the trasnsition should be smoth.
I used Danix to move from Dos to Unix.
Unlike the rest Danix is a dos port of Unix commands so as to give Dos that "Unix" feal.
The other files in the linked archive are also good for the job.

Also I was going to frivlously suggest using a "hot geek chick" the way beer ads use super modles to sell beer.
"Drink beer and date a super modle"
"Use Linux and date a hot geek chick"

But being realistic people aren't going to switch to Linux in order to date hot chicks. I honnestly could not think of a dumber reason.

Still ammusing to think of Cat teaching Linux... Yummm.

Forget GoZilla, Leach get etc etc. Use Wget, a truly excellent command line unix/linux program, it has so many options for resuming downloads and mirroring sites etc. that it really does put just about every other download manager to shame for being crap. Like you I use Windows for business purposes, having recently started my own business after working in a windows only shop. However I infected my computer with cygwin :) learned about all the real power tools and now I am in the process of switching over to Linux permanantly.

They might if they use Cygwin's X server, like I do.

All Windows users should have
cygwin

It's the law!

Ok, it's not, but it should be.

please try cygwin. Cygwin isn't the name of the shell, it's the name of the compatibily thingie that lets you use some GNU apps and other Free Unix apps on Windows. It mostly consists of some .dlls that act as a compatiability layer. You have your choice of shells to choose from on a Unix system. The one that's used on almost all Linux systems is bash, which is a feature-enhanced version of the classic Unix shell. That shell was called "The Bourne Shell" and was named "sh" (or should it be the other way round?). Therefore, it's only natural that the name bash stands for "The Bourne Again Shell".

The catch: In my experience, Cygwin runs much better on NT-based Windozes (NT 4.0, 2000, XP) than on DOS based Windozes (95, 98, Me). But, if you've got lots of processor power, Cygwin should still run quite nicely, even on crufty Win9x. The other catch: all of this sort of assumes that you're already somewhat familiar with the Unix Way. If you're not, it could be quite frustrating. But there are many, many help texts and HOWTos available (Google for HOWTO) and if you're adventurous and you want to know what a command line should be like, then it's out there waiting for you.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Another alternative is 4Dos or 4NT. It's available from these people. It's pretty good, except that's it's shareware and therefore commercial and I've had problems with certain versions crashing frequently. Also, there's a couple points where they could've gone for compatibility with Unix but chose to ignore it. (E.g. to not match the characters a,b, or c in a filename, they use [!abc] whereas the proper Unix Way is [^abc].)

The DOS command line sucks. (...) The DOS command line is a stripped down, sodomized version of most *nix shells. If you liked DOS, install your favorite UNIX variant, and try out bash. (Feel free to use ksh or csh to your liking.)

I basically agree with all of your points (from this post, as well as the rest of this thread), except that I'd suggest (and, in fact, I have already suggested) him trying out Cygwin before installing a full Unix distribution, and use the Bash under Windows instead the DOS command line. I would also not suggest using csh (mostly because of issues pointed out by Tom Christiansen in Csh Programming Considered Harmful). For his first non-Microsoft shell experience, I strongly recommend Cygwin version of Bash under his existing setup of Windows. Of course, GNU under Windows is not my final recommendation (since I use Debian even on my desktop) but I think it's a good start and it needs very little time to try it out.

Even after going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I still found it better to do 80% of my stuff from the command line. Windows 98 SE finally kicked me off of that habit :/

Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu :\

You need Cygwin. Run the Cygwin's setup.exe and install Bash -- it's a command shell, like the command.com, only much better.

Start from running your old stuff from Bash instead of DOS command line and you'll love it for its commands history, the command line editing, command and filename completion when you hit tab, and other simple things. Then you'll start to love the more advanced stuff.

Later install some of the other Cygwin packages -- especially fileutils, findutils, tar, gzip, bzip2, less, wget (extremely useful tools), textutils, grep, sed (tools for manipulating text), mc (Midnight Commander, a Norton Commander-like file manager), openssh (a secure kind of telnet and much more), perl (the swiss army chainsaw), vim, emacs, nano (text editors) -- and you'll be unstoppable. Seriously, you sound like a kind of person, for whom such tools exist.

Good luck!

Even after going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I still found it better to do 80% of my stuff from the command line. Windows 98 SE finally kicked me off of that habit :/

Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu :\

You need Cygwin. Run the Cygwin's setup.exe and install Bash -- it's a command shell, like the command.com, only much better.

Start from running your old stuff from Bash instead of DOS command line and you'll love it for its commands history, the command line editing, command and filename completion when you hit tab, and other simple things. Then you'll start to love the more advanced stuff.

Later install some of the other Cygwin packages -- especially fileutils, findutils, tar, gzip, bzip2, less, wget (extremely useful tools), textutils, grep, sed (tools for manipulating text), mc (Midnight Commander, a Norton Commander-like file manager), openssh (a secure kind of telnet and much more), perl (the swiss army chainsaw), vim, emacs, nano (text editors) -- and you'll be unstoppable. Seriously, you sound like a kind of person, for whom such tools exist.

Good luck!

Even after going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I still found it better to do 80% of my stuff from the command line. Windows 98 SE finally kicked me off of that habit :/

Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu :\

You need Cygwin. Run the Cygwin's setup.exe and install Bash -- it's a command shell, like the command.com, only much better.

Start from running your old stuff from Bash instead of DOS command line and you'll love it for its commands history, the command line editing, command and filename completion when you hit tab, and other simple things. Then you'll start to love the more advanced stuff.

Later install some of the other Cygwin packages -- especially fileutils, findutils, tar, gzip, bzip2, less, wget (extremely useful tools), textutils, grep, sed (tools for manipulating text), mc (Midnight Commander, a Norton Commander-like file manager), openssh (a secure kind of telnet and much more), perl (the swiss army chainsaw), vim, emacs, nano (text editors) -- and you'll be unstoppable. Seriously, you sound like a kind of person, for whom such tools exist.

Good luck!

Download gpg from gnupg.org. Build it.

According to the GnuPG web site, building GnuPG on Windows 2000 requires a "special setup," which I take to mean Cygwin. I currently use MinGW because I have had trouble getting Cygwin to work. What OpenPGP compatible software package do you recommend for users of Windows operating systems?

you forgot a step

1. Get cygwin
2. wget -m http://www.atarimagazines.com

As far as makefiles go, cmake looks promising. It seems to be a generalized Imake replacement. I haven't used it, but looks interesting. It is now part of the cygwin toolchain.

as far as tools go, look at cygwin. My company uses gnumakefiles on NT and UNIX, with generalized Makefiles for each project, and platform specific build rules in universal gmake include heeaders. We use ACE for a lot of the cross platform C++ stuff, a lot of our things are servers so we avoid the cross platform GUI stuff.

DJGPP is gcc for DOS not for Windows. mingw or cygwin are gcc ports for Windows.

It is hard to take this post seriously when all it does is bash Windows.

The article doesn't bash Windows the way Cygwin bashes Windows. Cygwin bash is better than the alternative.

you don't have to make it that using Windows is the crime of the century

For the poor, it is. A one-seat Windows XP license costs $300. If you use Windows without paying for it, you have committed either theft or copyright infringement.

Plus, you're not timothy.

At least you didn't say respectable CLI on a Desktop machine.

But never fear, you can install Cygwin on you WinXX machine and have a respectable CLI

IMHO, this isn't pertinent for a Donald Becker question. What is he going to say, "just ask nicely" ? The answer is unlikely to be very interesting or insightful. Company politics is usually specific to a given work environment and not very fruitful discussion-wise.

That said, you do realize that emacs, vi and practically ALL the GNU tools have been ported to Windows via cygwin? Therefore, you can use them as long as you are able to install software on your box. If you are not allowed, I doubt a sys admin would have a problem with installing cygwin. Heck, all the labs where I am currently schooling have cygwin access by default for CS students.

For OS X, you're talking about an operating system that should be able to run any POSIX compliant software via the FreeBSD core, so WTF is the problem? Must you approve EVERY software choice with management? That would be absurd.

I find it sad that must beg/convince management ("Pwetty pwease, may I use emacs, Mr. PHB?") to install and use what you consider the best tools for your job and can't use your choice of mail client.

Please enlighten me as to why all programmers need to use the same tools company-wide aside from perhaps compilers and the like? As long as we're talking a specific domain with nearly the same functionality (text editors, mail clients, office apps) who really cares what everyone uses so long as formats (HTML,XML,office docs,etc.) are agreed upon?

I'd love to hear: "Attention all coders. Tomorrow, you must use emacs for your development environment...or else!"

Any-who, what might Donald Becker have to say about your "issues" that can't be answered succinctly by Slashdot trolls?

I eagerly searched for open-source/free software alternatives that achieve the same integrated functionality, and came up lacking.

What, precisely, is it that you want "integrated"?

Administrators using Cygwin...

CygWin is awfully slow. When I'm on Windows, I stick with the native, though less capable (i.e. no usable alternative shell) UnxUtils and CygWin.

God, Windows has an *awful* virtual terminal, though. I keep wishing that I could use PuTTY's interface to talk to the local machine directly.

SMS is costly and difficult. Depending on the size of your IT department, SMS is probably overkill. After investigating SMS, we went with Citrix, which provides an architecture for Windows which is similar (please forgive the gross generalization) to X (client-server remote apps).

Install the software once, and all users have remote access. Citrix allows for all sorts of OSs to connect, as well. There are Windows, Mac, Linux, Win CE, PocketPC, etc clients, so all of your users have access to a Windows Desktop with Windows apps.

If you have no need for non-Windows clients, check out Microsoft Terminal Server. Same thing, but only Windows clients. The benefit is cheaper licensing -- if you buy Citrix for Windows 2000, you have to pay Terminal Server licensing as well. (Sorta like paying the mob for "protection").

Citrix is much easier to manage than SMS, and does not require an entire Windows infrastructure -- just a few servers. Figure 50 users (Office, Internet, Custom Apps, NOT streaming media or video games) per server. An office of 150 people will need ~3 servers (give or take, depending on usage.)

Combo Citrix with a good Windows X server (Cygwin is free), and you have a great cross-platform solution for any desktop using apps for Windows and Unix, simultaneously!!!!

nobody has mentioned LiteStep!
LiteStep is a replacement desktop environment released under the GPL.

I have nine desktops, can drag windows between them, I have cpu and ram meters, quick-launch buttons and shortcuts, and can even drag windows from other destkops anywhere (don't think you can do that in most desktop envs).

with litestep and mozilla, unless I have a windows [file] explorer open, there's no MS except the system (kernel, services) running - which means with the multiple-instances-of-explorer option, I need not worry about [i]explore[r].exe crashing.

and (obviously) there is theming

other GPL windows projects of interest:
FreeCiv Civilization (one and/or two+) clone
Gaim AIM/yahooim/msnim/icq/jabber/... client
and the already mentioned cygwin, vim, gimp, mozilla.

if you hunt for it, there's a cygwin version of gvim that allows unix paths, etc. but uses X.

Xfree86 for cygwin is now prime-time (in installer) and works really well with windowmaker and openbox, but lacks integration with ms windows as the wm (the way eXceed, winaXe, XwinPro, and Xthin do). please, please contribute to that somebody!

You know, PostgreSQL has been ported to Windows. You have to use cygwin, but it's stable and runs ok. See here for details.

Xandros has NOT distribute anything via money to anyone YET. So, there is no GPL violation YET.

Even giving away something for free is a GPL violation if you don't provide source.

However, my understanding is that you don't have to give away the source up-front, you only have to provide a written offer to provide the source for some number of years. You're allowed to charge a nominal amount of money for the distribution media.

But note that even if there is some delay you have to distribute the exact source for everything you distribute in binary form, even "beta tests".

Sometimes Unix apps are ported to windows by using the Cygwin DLL, and then given away for free, even with all the source code. But the Cygwin people are always very careful to ensure that people who do this provide the source code to the same version of the Cygwin DLL they link with; they have to give the source away themselves, it is not sufficient to provide a hyperlink to Cygwin's website.

POSIX, X Window System, NFS, LDAP, GTK+ and Gnome.

All of these can be run on any platform, providing a cross-platform, single-login environment. And throw in Scheme and Common Lisp for languages even more powerful and high-level than Java or C#.

Substitute or add C++ and wxWindows or Qt and KDE or Objective C and GNUStep or whatever you like for Lisp, GTK+ and Gnome if you don't like copyleft or too much openness or multiple languages. Why, you can even use Java or .Net now.

Even MS had an open standards strategy to migrate all users to Xenix, before it realised it had power enough to get users into a proprietary lock-in.

See Fink for the Mac OS X. It's based on Debian, and install all the missing part of open standards support on Mac OS X. Granted it would be more difficult to do on MS W32, but not impossible.

CygW32 is already part of the answer; refine it, rework it for dpkg, integrate better with MS W32 -- especially making X Window getting its configuration from the registry and integrating its windows on the MS W32 desktop -- and you have everything Mozilla is supposed to do, but better, faster, more powerful. And native.

I've never tried U/Win, but I will say that cygwin is anything but frustrating. The package selection tool (the setup.exe you download from cygwin) is extremely easy to use, and there are many good packages ported (I mainly use it for bash, so I can script things, but I've put postgresql on our demo boxes). For my needs I wouldn't buy a commercial package, but you may need packages that aren't there yet.

Where's Bourne shell??? Where's vi, sed, and egrep???

Here.

How do I get GUI applications to display over the network???

With this.

How do I read a PostScript file???

With this.

I know that many of these things can be done on Windows eventually

Red Hat Cygwin. The future is now.

No, Red Hat is not paying me to plug Cygwin.

Where's Bourne shell??? Where's vi, sed, and egrep???

Here.

How do I get GUI applications to display over the network???

With this.

How do I read a PostScript file???

With this.

I know that many of these things can be done on Windows eventually

Red Hat Cygwin. The future is now.

No, Red Hat is not paying me to plug Cygwin.

Where's Bourne shell??? Where's vi, sed, and egrep???

Here.

How do I get GUI applications to display over the network???

With this.

How do I read a PostScript file???

With this.

I know that many of these things can be done on Windows eventually

Red Hat Cygwin. The future is now.

No, Red Hat is not paying me to plug Cygwin.

What can a microsoft peon like myself view a postscript file with?

What you're not running CygWin with XFree86 and GNU ghostscript on your Windows box?

While running Windows go to those web sites and click on "Install Now" on each of them to run setup for each free product. If you have enough disk space you will eventually have the X Window System and a UNIX emulator running on your box. To update the system at a later date just use "install now" again.

What can a microsoft peon like myself view a postscript file with?

What you're not running CygWin with XFree86 and GNU ghostscript on your Windows box?

While running Windows go to those web sites and click on "Install Now" on each of them to run setup for each free product. If you have enough disk space you will eventually have the X Window System and a UNIX emulator running on your box. To update the system at a later date just use "install now" again.

OSX supports X fully as well as having a full Unix on it and thus also supports KDE and Gnome. Fink Packages. As for Windows: Gnome it is supported within cygwin and KDE is getting there.

Grep? $500? Ever heard of cygwin?

That means Windows is out the window because it is not POSIX compliant and certified

Microsoft has a simple POSIX layer built into Windows NT operating systems (including 2000 and XP). It's not very good (e.g. it can't run networking or graphics; thus, no X), but Microsoft does supply an upgraded POSIX layer called Interix. If you don't really need "certified", then Red Hat Cygwin might work; it implements (most of) POSIX on top of Win32.

so is Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X.

Linux not POSIX certified? Then what's this "POSIX conformance testing by Unifix" message I see every time I start Red Hat?

That's right...because Windows out of the box has nowhere near the functionality of Linux. How many programming languages come with Windows? (shell, vbscript, maybe jscript -no compiled languages). How many development environments come with Windows? (one - notepad. Unless you count copy con). All the nifty management tools that let you see what's going on...separate purchase. How many DBMS's come with Windows? None.

Oh come on, how is that a valid argument? I can go download Cygwin and install almost all of the major GNU applications that you mention. If having 'gcc' available somehow makes a platform better, then Linux and Windows are equal in that respect.

But that doesn't matter. You're comparing applications, not operating systems. If you want to go down that road, I'm afraid it's a slippery slope, there a truckload of high quality applications available for Windows that are not available for Linux; and vice versa.

The point is, if you're going to bring available apps into the comparison, then its ridiculous to try to compare a typical Linux distribution to a solitary Microsoft Windows Install CD.

Compare the Linux kernel to the Windows kernel; compare Linux and all its available apps to Windows and all its available apps; but do not try to tell me that Linux is somehow better because it comes with a bunch of applications on the same CD as the kernel.