Slashdot Mirror
Windows Services For Unix Now Free Of Charge
pole writes "Version 3.5 of Services for Unix will be free. Previously, it was $99. This article at Information Week has the details. It contains an NFS client and server in addition to POSIX libraries and utilities including pthreads. Aside from the NFS utilities, how does the environment compare to Cygwin?" An anonymous reader adds links to coverage at News.com and at geek.com, writing "The reviews for these tools have been highly favorable. It looks like the next volley has been fired in the struggle between Windows and Linux."
They include gcc, but most of the other utilities are from OpenBSD or other non-GPL sources (there are about 40 different licenses included). ActiveState perl is also included, though you can get that free anyhow.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I guess it depends on what you use it for. But as I have to do development work in Windows, I thought I'd try it out. Searching through the million line source tree our company has took about 10 times as long with 'grep' that came with "Services for UNIX" as it did with 'grep' that came with a now ancient version of MKS. Both of these were slower that current GNU grep on a Linux box, but the difference between GNU and MKS grep is not dramatic.
The lesson stays, however. If you expect to basically start with all the power of your Linux box, you'll be sorely dissappointed, just as someone expected the ease of use of Windows coming to Linux will be sorely dissappointed.
I really can't remember any glitches using it for 2+ years against Solaris 2.6 boxes.
Microsoft based this product upon OpenBSD: http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090 008
I've used both, SFU more extensively than Cygwin, though. SFU's NFS stuff is flaky. That's just the bottom line. I would much rather export shares to Windows clients with Samba than NFS. (I suppose it doesn't help that I'm not a big fan of NFS, either, but that's just full disclosure. It's the only thing I've seen that can reliably lock up a *nix machine. Now, of course, there are circumstances where you want this, but usually not.) Also, if you want all the features of their command line, you'll have to switch your Windows machine into a case-sensitive mode. It made me nervous to change something so fundamental to Windows. Maybe they'll fix that in this upcoming version; I dunno. On the other hand, using Cygwin is nice, but it's like a big tease. Most of it works like you want. It's just that if you're used to using Linux and ALL of it's tools, you're going to hit the wall pretty quick. (I just ran into this a couple weeks ago, and I've already forgotten what it was I was wanting.)
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
By way of some background:
/net sort of mapping within the Interix/POSIX subsystem, which is nice but fairly slow (though I note that this was particularly apparent to me because I was working remotely over DSL; I suspect there was a fair amount of roundtripping).
/net and it might not handle symlinks nicely. I remember benchmarking a version of the software prior to it being integrated in SFU, and it was about 3x faster than Samba in a LAN setting. [Kind of a an informal metrics: I was compiling a large project with network-based sources.]
The NFS client as of 3.0 is an improvement over the prior version in that it transparently conveys perms and ownership (according to whatever mapping has been established). It has support for a
In general, however, I think that NFS client access by way of the Win32 subsystem (i.e., not in the Interix POSIX subsystem) is pretty fast, though you might lose some of the perms transparency and there is no
It will be interesting to see if the performance within the POSIX has improved with the new version (3.5).