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That boatload of search/replace stuff might be able to be replaced with a perl/sed/awk script. If you're in an all-Windows shop, you can always load up knoppix to do that part -- or set aside 10 MB to do a desktop install of your favorite distro (knoppix is, once again an option) and dual boot. Better yet, just find an old machine in some storage room, somewhere that you can assign to the task.

Yeah - that's much easier than just grabbing the Windows ports. Or Cygwin.

Install cygwin instead! www.cygwin.com or, better yet.. USE a UNIX flavor!

I use Perl under Cygwin myself.
http://cygwin.com/
You could use a move native Perl like ActiPerl.

Recently, I played around with the Perl Win32 libraries. They do the usual API access, but one of them (forget which) lets you simulate keyclicks. There's a sample program on the web somewhere that has a 5-line Perl script launching Excel, and enter data in Excel cells.

What I like to see: a scripting engine with a Konfabulator like UI. Konfabulator isn't open-source, but I would like a client-side scripting engine with similar power. Haven't seen any.

This is interesting:
"Yahoo Purchases Konfabulator"
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/ 0530230&tid=185&tid=187&tid=95&tid=1&tid=3

"Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community .."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konfabulator
If Yahoo are building web-services support into Konfabulator, it can access any web-service, including on an Intranet.

Cygwin is not free. From http://cygwin.com/faq.html

The company, whom I work for, develops and sells closed source software. I contacted redhat for the details. The "buy out" license is prohibitively expensive. We ended up using a proprietary package because it was cheaper.

I use a lot of open source at work. cygwin, inkscape, Gantt Project, umlet, and dia to name just a few. But I use open source at work only as a consumer. I do not package any of the code in the company's products. At work, I use open source as a user, not a developer. Home is a different story. I code to plenty of open source there. None of that goes into work, however.

Cygwin is not free. From http://cygwin.com/faq.html

The company, whom I work for, develops and sells closed source software. I contacted redhat for the details. The "buy out" license is prohibitively expensive. We ended up using a proprietary package because it was cheaper.

I use a lot of open source at work. cygwin, inkscape, Gantt Project, umlet, and dia to name just a few. But I use open source at work only as a consumer. I do not package any of the code in the company's products. At work, I use open source as a user, not a developer. Home is a different story. I code to plenty of open source there. None of that goes into work, however.

If running Linux or BSD on your server isn't an option, then running Apache on Cygwin should work.

It all depends on the job you're doing. I have power tools that I use for working at home that are *very* simple (and unfriendly) and downright distructive in if not used properly (think SawzAll. This tool lives up to its name! Come to think of it, all of my Milwaukee tools fit this description). I have other tools that contain lots of safety features that don't let me do dumb things.

With linux, I use fluxbox + xterms (when I want to do graphical stuff) because much of anything else gets in my way. With windows, I don't have the option of getting a low-impact UI and I can't circumvent the existing UI by edting text files. It would be nice if MS (or another party) offered a reduced feature UI for users who aren't interested in the safety features.

Until then, I'll have to make due with cygwin and the Win2K interface.

I use this and this and it works like a charm.

Download CygWin for Windows and laugh.

AppRocket sounds like it does the same thing QuickSilver does. Some other cool hacks for Windows are ObjectDock and ObjectDesktop, which make Windows look like OS X. ObjectDesktop includes WindowBlinds, an alternative skinning product for Windows.

Hot corners on the other hand, I thought Windows supported those. Maybe it was just the After Dark screensaver I used to use... Regardless, one thing you should have noticed about Windows is that it isn't hard to find software to do whatever you're searching for.

Want to talk about rigidity? How about the fact that in Windows you only have one command line interpreter? And cmd.exe can't even copy/paste like a normal app.

There's a few things you can change to fix that. For instance, I change the defaults to use Quick Edit mode (hightlight then right-click to copy, right-click by itself to paste) and turn on Autocomplete (tab completion). Makes it feel a bit more like a UNIX shell. Too bad ls doesn't work in it. *writes up a quick .bat file to run dir/w when ls is typed*

Besides, as someone already pointed out, bash has been ported to Windows. You can use it with or without cygwin.

Install Cygwin, then put the bin directory of Cygwin in your PATH variable.

Bam! Grep and a whole host of other *nix utilities (including Bash, which you can use in place of cmd).

, it's not like the windows users can run your .rpm packages either.

Err, yes we can. And if they only contained documents, that would even be a useful capability! :)

... but still I miss a few of the features of Linux such as a fully fleshed out command line interface. What exactly am I supposed to do?

http://www.cygwin.com/

Here

Ok, but does bash or ksh run on windows? This is for their own OS, not unix.

Actually, yes, it does. Ever heard of cygwin? You can run a host of linux tools and shells on there including bash and ksh. I use it on my home computer so I don't have to continually reboot my computer just to use gcc or something of the like when I'm on Windows.

Ok, but does bash or ksh run on windows?

Ok, but does bash or ksh run on windows?

As a matter of fact ...

Ok, but does bash or ksh run on windows? This is for their own OS, not unix.


Of course it does, silly.

What's the problem here? Windows 2000 and XP already have a working shell available from the following website.

http://www.cygwin.com/

We already have CYGWIN

...you just gotta go download it from here.

Sweet. I need to find one of those for when our IT guys make me switch back to a Windows desktop.

...RPMdrake to me.

BTW, that screenshot is eleven generations old now. The new ones are even better, but I wanted to make the point that Linux has had this facility since more than a year before OS X was even released.

If you want a piece of software which has not been diskimaged, you need to go through exactly the same rigmarole you posit for Linux, but without URPMI or apt-get or YAST or yum or whatever to help you find dependencies.

Unless you're after something from Fink - a third-party effort which exists because...? Anyone...? [distant chorus: Apple's packaging is deficient]

Same story for Wintendo, of course, only there ain't no WinFink (although CygWin is close) and it don't come with no useful build system at all 'coz Microsoft are really only interested in having dependants, not partners.

The implication behind the diskimage install is that either the Apple apps have no dependencies (interesting concept), or everything gets shipped statically linked. Do your DMGs automatically upgrade with the rest of your system?

Not even Windows is a totally insurmountable problem.

Here you go.

There's a decent chance you could get it to run under cygwin fairly easily.

A major factor in my switch to Macintosh as my primary platform was that I could run both perl and Excel on the same machine.

So you're able to install Excel, but being unable to download and install Perl drove you to the Mac? What business do you have evangelizing that platform? Choose your poison:

* Activestate Perl
* Cygwin

Two completely different ways of getting Perl on Windows.

Maybe if more geeks played with the spreadsheets we could come up with best practices to hand over to the PHBs.

This is entering the realm of a technical artist - somebody who knows something about the underlying math, but also has a good eye for presentation.

It has been over a decade since the last innovative new spreadsheet - Lotus Improv. Time for something new.

I agree that Excel is ancient, but there are still modern newcomers like Gnumeric or OpenOffice?

I've used both Cygwin and WebTermX as X clients when accessing SGI machines from Windows, and I can tell you that Cygwin's X is exorbitantly slow, while WebTermX is relatively fast (on an ISDN connection you wouldn't even feel the lag). This experience leads me to believe that the Open Source implementation of X (at least on Cygwin) has a lot of catching up to do in terms of speed.

What about VNC/Remote Desktop for basic stuff, or perhaps using Cygwin to make yourself a pseudo-Linux server on the Windows box and do remote X apps to a tablet (running Cygwin's X Server for Windows)?

Third, the license under which a given tool falls does not usually extend to what it creates - I can use GCC to compile non-GPL code

This is only because you're not using gcc on cygwin. GCC is GPL'ed but it links your code against a library that has a special exemption so it is not GPL'd.

In cygwin, gcc links against cygwin1.dll which is GPL'ed and you would have to GPL any program you compile and distribute: http://cygwin.com/licensing.html

"The Cygwin API library found in the winsup subdirectory of the source code is also covered by the GNU GPL (with exceptions; see below). By default, all executables link against this library (and in the process include GPL'd Cygwin glue code). This means that unless you modify the tools so that compiled executables do not make use of the Cygwin library, your compiled programs will also have to be free software distributed under the GPL with source code available to all."

OS/2 had a package called EMX. EMX was to OS/2 what Cygwin is to Windows. With it, people would compile UNIX apps for OS/2, and they would just require a single DLL, not the entire craziness that Cygwin-compiled apps can be.

This compatibility was so good that all of X Windows could be compiled for OS/2, leading to XFree86OS/2 (some name, eh?). Windows now has the same thing with Cygwin/X, but OS/2 had it back in 1996...

It was really very nice to be able to run the real UNIX versions of things like Bind, Sendmail, IRCd, Apache and other such UNIX daemons. Of course, you could do the same with Linux, but like I said, this was back in the mid-90's. If you think Linux driver support can be bad today, try back then! At least OS/2 had *some* hardware drivers! :)

Even today, a ton of OS/2 software is ported to OS/2 using EMX, at least in the beginning: Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other such Linux Open Source projects.

The idea of building a UNIX (or Linux) subsystem for Windows is an *old* one. As TFA mentions, Posix "compatibility" was built into Windows NT from day one. The fact that it's still a steaming pile of cow dung shows how much of a desire there is for it. The Windows people couldn't care less, and the UNIX people would rather swallow swords than use the NT kernel, especially with FreeBSD and Linux out there... Is this doable? Absolutely. Is it worthwhile? People's words to the contrary, there hasn't been a huge groundswell of support...

OS/2 had a package called EMX. EMX was to OS/2 what Cygwin is to Windows. With it, people would compile UNIX apps for OS/2, and they would just require a single DLL, not the entire craziness that Cygwin-compiled apps can be.

This compatibility was so good that all of X Windows could be compiled for OS/2, leading to XFree86OS/2 (some name, eh?). Windows now has the same thing with Cygwin/X, but OS/2 had it back in 1996...

It was really very nice to be able to run the real UNIX versions of things like Bind, Sendmail, IRCd, Apache and other such UNIX daemons. Of course, you could do the same with Linux, but like I said, this was back in the mid-90's. If you think Linux driver support can be bad today, try back then! At least OS/2 had *some* hardware drivers! :)

Even today, a ton of OS/2 software is ported to OS/2 using EMX, at least in the beginning: Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other such Linux Open Source projects.

The idea of building a UNIX (or Linux) subsystem for Windows is an *old* one. As TFA mentions, Posix "compatibility" was built into Windows NT from day one. The fact that it's still a steaming pile of cow dung shows how much of a desire there is for it. The Windows people couldn't care less, and the UNIX people would rather swallow swords than use the NT kernel, especially with FreeBSD and Linux out there... Is this doable? Absolutely. Is it worthwhile? People's words to the contrary, there hasn't been a huge groundswell of support...

As long as you're using the school's network, you have to abide by the school's policies.

There are alternatives though.

At my school the IT department recently decided to disallow "all illegal p2p" use under penalty of being permanently banned from the network. This is being carried out by someone just shutting down the port of anyone who trips the schools IDS (snort) or a second system that detects several p2p programs. Needless to say there are tons of false positives.

After numerous written and face to face requests for clarification of the nonexistant policy, attempts to explain legitimate uses, requests to know specifically what we where doing that was illegal, and even asking for a refund on our tuition fee, it became apparent that the IT department just doesn't care.

So for better or worse a number of other ways to circumvent or change these restictions where found:

Prevent them from identifying your traffic. This can be done by setting having friends at other schools set up proxies. These include socks with "ssh -g" on http://cygwin.com/ along with socks-cap or tsocks, individual ssh tunnels, or vpn.

If they cite excessive bandwith caused by p2p make your point by having everyone use a lot of legitimate bandwith with http://porntoolkit.sourceforge.net/
for example.

Here they got frustrated with not being able to identify traffic, so they just started shutting off people for excessive bandwith. The solution to this is to use onion routing like http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Tor or a similar method within the schools network so that the load of bandwith leaving or entering the network is distributed evenly between many people. I couldn't find too many solutions for this that I liked too much, but a couple hundred lines of python did the job.

Finally, especially if the blocking is being done by hand, you can do some less nice stuff ranging from overloading thier logs with thousands of palse positives to filling the lan with random mac addresses and doing banned stuff with spoofed IPs. This, however, is probobly a bad idea and rather script kiddiesh.

Additionally you may be able to unblock yourself with "ifconfig hw ether NEW_MAC_ADDRESS_HERE" on linux or http://ntsecurity.nu/toolbox/etherchange/ on windows.

So there are alternatives to just living with it if all reasoning and begging with your school goes nowhere. And remember, if all else fails there's always usenet over ssl! Good luck.

Geez, maybe you should pay attention to what you are answering. As I said already, most people do not care about development of software and totally don't care about software development tools.

Those who do, can quite easily work under MS Windows by using Free Software tools. GCC - go down the list and you will see that you can get yourself a build that works on MS Windows.

Here is a PHP installer for Windows.

Here is a JDK installation for windows from Sun.

Here is a bunch of Free apps that will run under Java on any platform Apache

Here is a nice development tool for you - Eclipse.

Here is cygwin, in case you want your vi and other *nix tools under MS Windows.

I can give you thousands more examples. A whole bunch of interpreted languages, native compilers, free dev tools, you name it. It all works under Windows. You are spreading the FUD.

Now, as I said, the argument that GNU/Linux costs less works much better for the PCs sold to lower-class people, if it means they can actually afford the box.

If you are a middle-class individual, who can afford the box even if it is whatever X dollars more expensive, you are much better off with a Windows box. The chances are you will want to run MS Windows software and if you cannot then what good is the box?

Anyone at all can download a Free OS, once you have some OS installed on some box.

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?split
http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?cat

You can get them in XP through Cygwin.

You just encrypt the passwords but not the data, if IIRC. Maybe think about something using the SSH protocol.

On Windows, the easiest solution/least expensive solution is probaby via Cygwin as another poster stated using SFTP from OpenSSH. If you need commercial software, I'd strongly recommed SecureFX from Van Dyke Software. Scriptable interface, supports FTP, SFTP and FTP over SSL. From the command line, I believe it doesn't support FTP over SSL but I could be wrong.

Install Cygwin (basically its a Unix command line & environment for Windows) and then install sftp, scp, or ssh. All three will get the job done. I have never found a Windows FTP GUI that I liked... hell I haven't found an SFTP GUI on any platform that I liked. Fetch on OSX is very nice but doesn't support SFTP (unless I'm an idiot and missed something).

Hey. In case anybody cares, there really isn't a need for VNC, as long as you're not using Windows 98 on your media server. Or maybe XP Home too. Windows NT-based operating systems (i.e. 2000 & XP Pro) allow you to use Terminal Services as you're doing to get into them. There's a Remote Desktop client available for both Linux and Mac OS X (www.rdesktop.org).

If you're using Linux as your media server, just connect to it using a remote X-Server. It might be a little less intuitive for a Windows user to understand, but you can locally display your programs on your client that are actually running on your server. The client can be Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. On free windows X server can be obtained at www.cygwin.com.

I'm sure you know all this, but this is just in case anyone else is reading your post looking for options.

"Choice, flexibility and cost are really the driving factors [for Linux adoption]. And Microsoft would have to stop being Microsoft to ever compete with that combination." - emkey

I'm not sure if this should be a reply to someone else's comment, so I'll start anew.

I'm the guy who helped port the gaim-encryption plugin FROM Linux over TO Win32. (The opposite of the article and this topic, I know). But, after I sent the patches back up to the maintainer, he was able to easily carry it in his source tree.

I used Cygwin and MingW to handle the compilation with his original autoconf, etc. build environment. Of course, there was the requisite GTK+ libraries, etc. that went along with it too. But the magic was MingW and Cygwin.

Perhaps this could give the various developers some insight that "it really can be done".

--
3. Don't forget to enjoy!

Most linux distributions come with at least three database servers, five email servers and a thousand other programs you can install from the disk.

The discussion is about Linux on the desktop. (How did you miss that?) And on the desktop, Linux has very little to offer. My point was that this is because the projects are focused on creating something only marginally better than Windows, rather than something really and truly great in it's own right.

Also, projects like Fink for Mac OS X and Cygwin for Windows make adding those "thousands of other programs" trivial. Unfortunately there's no such trivial way to make Linux GUIs not suck.

I don't expect every site to cater to MY browser, but it sure does annoy me when a site works ONLY in some specific setup.

if you wanted purty, you wouldn't be using Lynx in the first place. :)

In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs whose sources are distributed under a license that complies with the Open Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll without libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll itself causing the resulting program to be covered by the GNU GPL.

This means that you can port an Open Source(tm) application to cygwin, and distribute that executable as if it didn't include a copy of libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll linked into it.

I can't resist posting my old sig here

The power and flexibility of Windows, the user-friendlyness of Linux.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of open source developers who have never touched GNU Make.
Open source on windows, OMG it does exist!!!!
Step out of your Linux bubble.

What's Linux-centric about GNU make?

I'm primarily a Windows user, and I used to use GNU make all the time. Until I realised I preferred omake.

x server for windows

I didn't read your comment till the end, and missed "...that hasn't been a problem for me on any of the Windows machines, and I don't have access to a Linux box..."

Anyway, cygwin is a good way to run Linux commands on a Windows box.

A package in Cygwin is a tarball, basically run from /. So you can download a Cygwin package with, say, your web browser, cd / in your cygwin install, tar -xzvf *thefile*, and that installs it. It's crap, it's nothing but crap. Dependency resolution? Don't know how they do it, really, unless the database they use to store packages also contains dependency information.

I actually noted something similar when I first started migrating toward Linux...from proprietary Unices (Solaris, HPUX, Irix...).

It was that the Linux userland (command line environment and applications) was far richer. This ~1997.

For starters were the shells (bash and zsh over csh and korn/POSIX shell). If you were really lucky, you might find Solaris with tcsh installed.

But it was specific command-line apps that were the real differentiators. Whether retools (gawk vs. nawk), more secure (ssh vs. telnet), or wholy new (Perl, wget, rsync, Python, mutt....). Proprietary Unices of the time were try to tell me that VUE, or OpenLook, or CDE, or $ENTERPRISE_GUI_ENVIRONMENT_DE_JOUR was All I Needed. Bollox.

The point is that it's a combination of factors which makes GNU/Linux what it is. The Unix Philosophy (simple tools, one thing well) is part of it. But the "OS of the users, by the users, for the users" bit is what keeps the actual useful stuff, not high-glitz and sexy interfaces that look good on brochures and in executive presentations, is also essential.

Microsoft has neither. It has no unifying process / file / user / interaction model, as does Unix. And developing "advanced user tools" is seen as a value-add / bonus-pak sort of thing (as was providing solid utilities or dev tools for proprietary 'Nix). And the result is: you can't comprehend the fundamental principles, and you can't count on a base toolkit on being available -- on different platforms, on different sites, even on different boxes within a site.

Sure, MSFT have provided various answers to 'Nix shell and scripting over the years, and I've seen several of them go from hype to dust. Which is another large part of the problem. On my Linux box, the scripts and trix I first picked up 18 years ago at college Still Work. But the environment hasn't remained static, not by a long shot: it's been incrementally improved and augmented over the years. Unmodified scripts, etc., still work, but new ways are available.

Best of both worlds.

So: your point that it's not the shell, but the shell-based programs, that provide functionality? My point exactly: Microsoft have failed to either tend to providing these tools, or provide an environment in which they could flourish. The result is that "third-party" plug-ins such as Cygwin are vastly preferred for automating and managing such tasks. Works. Cross-platform (both among MSFT and 'Nix variants) portable. And long-term uniform and stable. Not an inconsiderable factor.

Underneath the Win32 API is the NT Native API. NtCreateProcess can be called with the SectionHandle parameter set to NULL which produces a new process with the same address space as the ParentProcess handle, mapped copy-on-write just like fork. CreateProcess from win32 calls this function to create a new process but does not expose all of the functionaility.
SFU and the POSIX subsystem have to use NtCreateProcess too, but take advantage of SectionHandle=NULL.

Cygwin uses copy-on-create to simulate copy-on-write by copying the entire address space to the child. This is slow and wastes memory. The cygwin mailing lists have had endless arguments on why they don't take advantage of NtCreateProcess. Here's a small thread.
Also, there is the problem that Win32 does a lot more than just call NtCreateProcess: the native function creates a new process but nothing else. It allocates no memory, creates no threads, and loads no libraries. When you call CreateProcess from Win32, it does all that for you. Since Cygwin implements Posix (and related) over Win32, not Posix over NT (as opposed to SFU which is over NT), they feel compelled to use only Win32 functions.
It would be nice to have a cygwin fork that creates its own subsystem, an open-source SFU, that would take advantage of this kind of thing.

Depending on fork to provide stability is a workaround for the real problem: the app crashing.
Besides, if your data areas are well defined, you can put them in shared memory sections and have the children map that copy-on-write at the same addresses.