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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."
Let's make this simple for simple people like me. Does this mean in a week I can go to Microsoft's website, download a .exe file, run it, and be able to mount NFS partitions off my linux file server? I could ditch samba? Yes no?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Can you say, "embrace and extend?"
What a fantastic set of tools for people who are migrating thier windows boxes to a Linux/Unix envirornment. Glad they finally saw the light of day and are working to join us.
It's really "unix services" for "Windows". They can't even get the name right - what else did they screw up at the forge of Mordor?
--
make install -not war
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
The idea is obviously to encourage migration from Unix to Windows, but it can just as easily be used to encourage migration in the other direction.
It is to be hoped that such opportunities are taken up by people wishing to get the out of MS lock in in a gradual manner.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
A shallow compatibility layer. I like it better than Cygwin, but that is just me.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Something like this happen could mean that Microsoft is starting to have a slight change of heart about the presence of Linux/UNIX. Having this available for free could be great boon to people who have to run Linux alongside M$ - this ranks right up there with Samba, IMO.
Especially interesting is the addition of the pthread library to the Posix API package.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
So now the answer is "free". I'm not saying I like Windows servers over Unix-style boxen - but this was a good business choice for MS.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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.
Anyone know?
I'm not gonna use it unless I get the source. Period.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Microsoft based this product upon OpenBSD: http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090 008
Wow, what a great acronym, and I'm quite surprised that they seem to be actually using it externall!
Anyone who disagrees with microsoft can just SFU! I mean, install SFU from microsoft.com.
(Just in case somebody missed it, SFU = Shut the F**k Up.)
We are really starting to see the results of constant economic pressure in Microsoft. Once a monopoly has real competition - it is forced to either *gasp* innovate or lower prices! I think in the coming years, All computer users will benefit from Linux - even if they never use it. Windows users will see lower prices and a somewhat friendlier Beast, and Mac users are already getting a ton of great open source product integreted into OS X.
Microsoft was giving tons of them away on their Windows 2003 Server promotional tour and as has been note elsewhere this is really just an OpenBSD distro with a few more LDAP-ish tools thrown in.
I think the message from Microsoft with all of this seems to be that Unix stuff is worthless and just a hassle to tie together with their products. Reality: Microsoft products are a huge liability. Ask anyone who has had their files randomly mailed due one of the thousands of email viruses. The security breaches that Microsoft products bring to the table far more than offset any of their claimed savings in techie hours. Typical BigCo at this points wants to be safeguarding what productivity they have, not tossing it away by opening up more holes than can be patched twice monthly over broadband. Bleh. Even if they gave away MicrosoftServer 2003, I still wouldn't bite. Put the Exchange stack on Linux, and then we'll talk.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
This great news for those windows users out there. It will be surely provide much needed apps for this upstart operating system. Now, whenever someone says, "Windows? But what can I do with it?" you can point out that they can run their favorite unix apps.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Overall, services for unix is good. It provides many of the common unix utilities, and it integrates them into the shell [even just cmd] very well. Much better, and 'cleaner' than cygwin. Cygwin has *many* more tools though, and they work 'well enough'.
In my experience, using the two together [having SFU's directory in the path before cygwin's] gives you the best of both releases.
This was speculated on in an article at Groklaw, that this was the intent (aside from financing the anti-Linux FUD campaign) in M$ paying SCO for a license.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Why does Microsoft want to support Unix/Linux applications on Windows? It does not seem to make sense. Every deployment of a portable application on Windows creates an opportunity for moving to Linux at a later stage (vis. OpenOffice).
Presumably the "Unix" services will include extensions that make the migration a one-way affair. Presumably also Microsoft have some killer Unix/Linux applications in mind that they want/need to be able run on Windows. Apache? Hmmm...
Presumably also the goal is to turn Windows into something closer to what corporate IT centers actually want.
It reminds me a lot of IBM's drive to include Unix-like features in OS/370. An obvious thing, to make one's OS POSIX-compliant. But all POSIX compliancy drives seem to lead to Linux.
So... the very first thing I thought when I first heard about this, and the thing I still think today is that this is the first step in the direction of a Microsoft-branded Linux distribution.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
going between Windows and Linux boxes. I speak from first hand experience. An FTP transfer of the same (very large) file goes 10 times as fast on my gigabit network. I can't speak for NFS, but SMB is certainly not the be-all-end-all for serving files.
Impossible.
All anti MS rhetoric aside, this is a smart move for them to make. By making support for POSIX api's freely available, it allows someone to port a unix type app over with a re-compile and perhaps some changes to the make file.
People like to roast MS for not adhering to standards, among other things. This partly answers that.
Of course, this does not make MS a "Good Corporate Citizen" any more then donating money to a homeless shelter makes a tobbaco company a "Good Corporate Citizen". But it does show that once in a while, even bad people can do good things, even if the motives are questionable.
And I have no doubt that Microsofts motives will be questioned here.
END COMMUNICATION
..as he mentions that "very few of our customers are going to have a pure Unix or pure Windows environment".
Previously, I used to think that at least half of the MS customers or so would have a pure Unix environment. Thanks for enlightening me, Dennis!
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
how does the environment compare to Cygwin?
One is licensed under GPL, and the other isn't....
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
POSIX environment... C compiler... you know, it should be possible to get my depenguinator to work here.
I'm not sure about being able to write the filesystem image to disk, Windows might not allow that.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Ah, yes. The Welsh-centric fork of Cygwin.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Interix used OpenBSD as is evidenced at deadly.org
So like 95% of it is just OpenBSD, mostly pulled from theh 3.0 release tree.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
If your interested:
:-)) hompage is here. However, it appears that the free download hasn't been made available yet on the page.
The intro & specifications for this are available here. The SFU (anyone else wanna add a T there somewhere?
This is going to be interesting. Microsoft is doing everything it can to hobble OSS projects from interacting with their systems (note the explicit anti-GPL clause in the SMB documentation licenses) and yet they're using OSS tools to try to draw people onto their platform.
It's dirty fighting - they're taking every advantage afforded by the very kind of freedom they're actively trying to stamp out.
That's one of the unfortunate costs of freedom - some will use it against you. The OSS community is an open book, theirs is a very closely guarded hand of cards..
Here's the million dollar question: Is there anything that the OSS community can do to compete with this kind of underhandedness?
I hear quite a bit of complaining on Slashdot about Microsoft and their software/business practices. The complaints may have some merit, but I think a no-cost tool that helps integrate Windows and *nix is great.
Diversity is the only way to survive. If Linux (or any OS) dominates to the extent Microsoft has we all lose. I think Microsoft is starting to see that. They may be simply acting like they want interoperability, but if it makes my job (mixed *nix/windows admin) easier without costing my employer more than I am all for it.
BTW I have a copy of v3.0 that I got for the cost of shipping. Those who must admin Windows systems but enjoy the tools availble on *nix should definately check it out.
the_crowbar
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines
They need to start offering "Windows Services for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000", because this is where a lot of their customers hopped off the upgrade bus.
C'mon, raise your hands, how many of you are still administering a pair of Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers because Active Directory was overkill for your single-site 100 employee company? I know I am.
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First it was OpenNT from a comapny called Softway Systems which provided a fully POSIX-compliant subsystem replacement for NT.
Later, Softway renamed it to Interix, and shortly after that Softway was bought out by Microsoft. At that time, the guts of Interix were used to make the 'Services for Unix'.
it is ported to Windows. (BTW... Got this from some other post on Slashdot a long time ago)
Sola Scriptura Sola Fide Sola Gratia Sola Christus
"The real driver behind this [pricing] change is this interoperability issue," Oldroyd says. "We want Windows to be the best platform for interoperability."
Since when? Does this mean Windows Whatever'sNext will be able to read Mac and ext2 floppy disks? Does this mean their APIs and protocals will be more open to allow for better communication and cooperation with other platforms?
Or does this mean "We don't want Windows apps kicked out of Unix dominated businesses, and thus begin a general migration away from Microsoft software?"
Or is this a very clever move to get Unix houses to set up one Windows box with this on it in order to be able to interface with the outside world better, and thus give them some targets for the marketing department?
Monopolies aren't interested in interoperability - they're usually out to destroy it. Look this gift horse in the mouth very carefully - Microsoft is not trustworthy and anything they say or do is suspect. This could wind up being just a nice candy piece tossed to the Unix world, but I am forced to wonder what Microsoft is getting from it, and in what situations a $99 fee would stop someone where free is a go-ahead price. Not any big shops, that's for sure. Remember, with any Microsoft move the first rule is to ask what they are expecting to get out of it.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
If this comes with a good X server for Windows, it might make it easy to set up a Linux Terminal Server in a Windows desktop shop. That might be a good way for people to get their feet wet.
Or does this thing only work on Win2k or XP Server editions?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Say a windows shop decides to introduce a *n(i|u)x fileserver. With samba they gotta make sure that any new windows version can talk to samba. Sure new windows versions don't appear every year but still often enough for it to be a concern. Especially with License 6.0 where you pay for the upgrade of windows anyway.
Now if the new windows can just talk for free to the nfs on the unix machine. Hmm, no longer an obstacle to upgrading. Then again no obstacle to using a unix machine either.
Mmmm, I think this may be a case were MS may neither lose nor win.
As for making it free. Did some NFS for windows maker piss of Bill Gates? If this is a good nfs and not one of ms'es standard embrace and break jobs then they are all out of business.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Salesman: I broke my cup holder.
IT Guy: Reboot and see if it gets better.
Sometimes, it's the clueless and the stubborn. Nobody wins in that situation, except Microsoft.
They are a shady company that isn't above immoral behavior to get ahead.
That is why this seemly good gesture is being scrutinized.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As you can see.
1) WSFU is faster (IO/API/...)
2) WSFU is better integrated with win32 architecture (OLE/ODBC/...)
3) WSFU make a lot of things easier than cygwin with windows
BUT, i wouldnt trade cygwin for it, note that i have both installed here. I just isolated what i needed from WSFU and was better than cygwin and added them last in my path. I dont have any preferences, but cygwin is waaay more complete, and you have the +/- the same versions of the application that runs on linux. Same config files work fine, same behaviours (which isnt the case with WSFU), etc.
For me, WSFU is just a little + to cygwin.
-- search the web
I've already heard it as STFU...
Anyway, it's still better than the Critical Update Notification Tool.
Providing a way to run Unix apps on Windows isn't exactly a threatening proposition. In fact, the open source community has done the same thing -- Cygwin has been around for years.
If anything, putting Unix API's on Windows provides one more way to write cross-platform applications. Remember, the Unix API's are open standards, so if you write your software to run on them, you've got something that now runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. I personally have used Cygwin (SFU would work too) to avoid writing Windows native software. Just load Cygwin, bring over the standard build, tune, and ship.
Microsoft SFU also provides NFS and NIS implementations on Windows, which I have found useful for introducing Linux and Unix into previously Windows-only environments.
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All anti MS rhetoric aside, this is a smart move for them to make. By making support for POSIX api's freely available, it allows someone to port a unix type app over with a re-compile and perhaps some changes to the make file.
I agree that it makes it easy to port applications by almost just recompiling. I disagree that it is a smart move.
This represents how Microsoft has been successfully misdirected. They do not have their eye on the ball.
The real threat in the short term is not Linux. It is all of the cross over software such as OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. While these things run on Windows, they make it even more likely that eventually masses of people will find fewer hurdles in switching to Linux.
When GUI programs become as easy to port to Windows by just recompiling, it will be attractive to developers to write to Linux, because for very little additional effort, you get both platforms. And more cross-platform software appears. Making it even easier to eventually switch to Linux (for people using cross platform software).
I disagree that this is a smart move. What exactly were they expecting? That masses of servers are going to switch to Apache on Windows because it is so much better?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
If Microsoft wanted to change SMB (and lock out SAMBA), they would need some other network file system.
So, maybe, SFU is being released to allow claim that Microsoft based servers can share with NFS, and that SMB can now be modified to add additional (Longhorn) features, while locking the *nix world out (say, by encrypting the traffic and not telling how).
SAMBA becomes useless; and if executed properly, Windows shares become completely MS proprietary. Limited access to "competitive" OSs provided by NFS.
New features available to Windows ONLY.
If I were doing a strategy for MS, this is the path I would take. Also, ensure that NFS is available for a LONG lead time, and that it runs well.
But maybe I'm just a paranoid.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
FINALLY, an NFS client for win!
Yeah, that sounds like the best aspect of this, to me. I've often wanted to mount NFS shares from Windows, but didn't want to shell out big bucks for an NFS package... this one will almost certainly become the defacto one now, which is a probably more or less a good thing.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
``Instead, they'll just SFU - it costs nothing, and it lets me run Apache/PHP/MySql, or whatever.''
...).
You're kidding, right? These have all been ported to win32.
By the way, does anyone else have the feeling that SFU would more appropriately be called SFW? (which could be expanded to Services For Windows, Software Finally Working,
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you look a the letter on 6/24 from Novell to SCO (partly quoted below) they disputes SCO legal rights to enter into a new agreement with Microsoft.
As voiced yesterday a lawsuit by Novell against SCO is almost certain. They are currently trying to Audit SCO's records in an effort to bring their ducks in row, and presto. Once the suit over Copyright et al is filed SCO effort to get more money will be impossible. On an aside head over to Groklaw and read about SCO's effort o hire a sales manager for their non-existant IP in Linux.
Quote
It has come to our attention that SCO may have violated these provisions. In particular, SCO reported in a recent securities filing that SCO has established a program to review existing licenses, and enter into new licenses, relating to UNIX and that this effort "resulted in the execution of two license agreements" during the quarter ended April 30, 2003. The securities filing states:
The first of these licenses was with a long-time licensee of the UNIX source code which is a major participant in the UNIX industry and was a "clean-up" license to cover items that were outside the scope of the initial license. The second license was to Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft"), and covers Microsoft's UNIX compatibility products, subject to certain specified limitations. These license agreements will be typical of those we expect to enter into with developers, manufacturers, and distributors of operating systems in that they are non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, paid up licenses to utilize the UNIX source code, including the right to sublicense that code.
Help fight continental drift.
I've got an MSDN subscription at my company, so I was installing and using SFU for awhile. Other posters have noticed that SFU's version of grep is slow, though, so I did a bit of research and I've taken to installing the Win32 ports of the GNU utilities also. There's a SourceForge project called UnixUtils that ships a bunch of them in either a zip file (unzip to %systemroot%\system32\) or as a binary installer. They work natively within cmd.exe, so there's no need to use a separate shell as SFU does.
It is missing a few things, but between grabbing SFU for its commands like ls and cp, and the unixutils package, you get the best of both worlds.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
Anyway, back to the product... the picture on its box cleary tries to illustrate Unix as confusing and obfuscated. It looks like they've written some nonsensical script in ksh, which starts like this:
It's like they want us to say, "...yeah, I'm glad that we're moving away from this confusing UNIX stuff. Windows is so much easier."So now I can run awk and csh in Windows? Couldn't I already do that with cygwin?
I'm surprised that MS is giving this away. I imagine they are still paying a decent price to mks to license this code since WSFU is really a subset of the MKS Toolkit for windows.
And not only that, but "IBM" was never an acronymn , but an initialism.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
It's marketed as a means of migrating NIS users to AD, but it works even better for LDAP, with suitable libnss_ldap.conf and pam_ldap.conf files. The only previous solution was AD4UNIX which no longer seems to be maintained, and is flaky on later service packs. For us, having this for free is good news.
Jon
Does it have vi? Screw you, Emacs users. Light, powerful, efficient and easy to use, vi is clearly the editor that intelligent programmers use. Written in a much more powerful programming language than the obviously dying Emacs, vi is the editor of editors. I mean, c'mon, imagine Emacs running under CYGWIN on a Win box! That's like running three kludges at one time!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
some people would be clamoring for an OSS alternative to Notepad
Both Vim and GNU Emacs have been ported to Microsoft Windows.
Dave Scott, of Microsoft is talking about this tonight at the St. Louis Unix User's group.
His talk is entitled:
"Running UNIX Applications on Microsoft Operating Systems
by Dave Scott, Microsoft"
Here is the web site http://www.sluug.org
There is a location link on the main page. Starts at 6:30 or 7:00.
Ed
The GPLed code in question _must_ be available to the user, per the GPL. A particular person may charge you to give it to you, but they must give you the _source_. Therefore, the software is unleashed from any one master. That's a valid definition of "free", and the one in which most Free Software supporters are interested.
Not all OSes are the same, because some manage computers more efficiently, and most do so in differing and incompatible ways outside a small family of related OSes. A Yugo and a Porsche are both cars, but they are not the same. A farm tractor and a bicycle are even less the same.
Using an OS and changing the source are two different things. You don't have to have the source to use an OS. Having the source does, however, make it much easier to improve it or customize it. No, you don't have to be a programmer to want to make a change to your OS. You can hire someone who is a programmer to make the change for you. Again, this is not necessarily an economic freedom (as in free beer), but a freedom to do something (as in free speech).
Stallman (often referred to as RMS), founder of the free software Foundation, never asserted that a thing cannot be property of its creator. He merely stated that when the cost of making a duplicate of that thing is essentially nil (as in someone being allowed to redistribute the source for a program) that in the long run it is better for society if the author doesn't charge for the additional copies. The value of the work should be covered by the impetus to create it in the first place. If you need it, write it. If you are paid to write it, write it. Then the code was paid for, and additional copies, taking no resources to make, could cost nothing. The body of software available to everyone could then be multiplied by the number of such releases. There of course are people who think it's outright wrong to patent or copyright anything. There are also people who believe in Scientology.
You make many assumptions and generalizations which are unfair. One of them is that everyone who supports Linux is a zealot. Frankly, I don't care if you use Linux or not. I do support the efforts of those who choose to use it and develop it. It's a choice. After all, "free" is about choice.
Think 'unbound', not 'gratis'. Go ahead, call RMS a hippy. He doesn't care. You can call me what you will, too. You are free to do that.
I tested it out the other day when it came out, and the first thing I noticed through the installation was that it required you to either have a local /etc/passwd or /etc/group file *already* created, or you had to specify an NIS server to use. I just aborted the installation because I didnt have time to craft a passwd and group file by hand or copy one off some other machine and have it possibly be rejected by the installation script. I also noticed that specifying an empty file or one that did not exist the installation would complain and not go any further.
I dont know about anyone else, but I'll stick with Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com) for now or until they get their act together and write a cleaner install script.
I dont know if anyone else noticed .,but the banner ad on this article is the same annoucement and link back to microsoft for download...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why are people all excited about this, say things like "gee, Microsoft is finally feeling the heat from Linux"? This is nothing more than a Linux-to-Windows migration tool!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
BillG: Great! It looks like we have another winner on our hands. People sure do want that Unix stuff. Oh, wait...
SFU PM: erm...
BillG: You're fired.
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."
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/9/0/69096 da8-c88c-40b5-a4f1-5fd0847f9435/SFU35BETA_EN.exe
Microsoft was very smart... They're offering it for free which is a positive move for everyone assuming the EULA is sane.
However, they're also making it incompatible with 9x and XP Home meaning that all of the geek hobbyists on here who have a mix of *nix and windows machines and wanted to use it from home might need to upgrade their windows os to use them.
Microsoft's Site on 3.5 beta
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I have 3 windoze boxes on my network atm. My daughter has one, my wife the other - both their primary work/play stations, and I have a juiced up P4 as my game box (that is all it does - the only thing running on it is 'systray', and whatever game I happen to be playing, most likely WWIIonline)
I have 3 other machines that are all Linux machines (Redhat - soon to be Debian file server, Debian workstation, and a Slackware network analysis machine).
I've played with Cygwin, Hummingbird etc. over the years - and found the emulation of the unix environment Kludgey, and not transparent enough for my tastes.
Basically I wanted a bash compliant shell that was transparent enough to run the standard set of unix CLI tools (ls, ps, grep, df etc...) - but also allow me to kick off native windows and dos applications without switching modes of operation (i.e. type in the path and have it run the application). I did not need to be able to compile binaries - my main purpose for this tool would be to write utility scripts for system administration on the boxes. I wouldn't need remote access (although I might implement that as a seperate capability with freely available tools if needed - outside the scope of my project).
Then a thought hit me - why not implement this in python? I already have python loaded on most of my windows machines - why not make it universal? Python would serve as the abstraction layer I needed - and provide a built-in scripting capability to boot. All of the unix tools will be implemented in python either as built-ins or as seperate '.py' scripts.
Additional functionality - such as 'crontabs' would need to be implemented, as well (haven't worked out the details of that yet).
Ideally, you would drop python and this package on the windows box -- and presto! Instant CLI... And the nice thing about it is that it would be using native windows APIs - so would be faster than some of the emulators that attempt to be a complete source compliant emulation environment.
I haven't seen any drawbacks, yet. The cron functionality might be a bit of an issue - but it doesn't look insurmountable.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Can be found from Interix. You can change the crappy KSH to Bash and get a nice build system up and going in no time. I normally use Cygwin but I'm going to give this a try, even if it isn't GPL'd.
I have UNIX Services 3.0 and I personally love it. I was NT-only until 4 years ago when I started adopting UNIX/Linux, and now I routinely use vi instead of notepad, just out of habit. Things like pwd are small utilities, but really useful when I need it.
I use the NFS feature to mount my W2K box to NFS mounts. That part is simple.
I also mount from Linux to NT. If you give the NT share anonymous, read-only access, then it's simple. If you want more refined security, then it gets more complicated.
You need to do mapping between NT usernames and UNIX user names via a User Name Mapping proxy. I'm sure it works well, but it's kind of hard to understand how to use, and after 30 minutes, I gave up and made the shares from NT anonymous read-only access.
I'm sure if I spent maybe 2 hours on this I could get everything to work, but since this is my home network and I don't have a whole lot of user accounts, I figured I didn't need it.
This is the first line in the Overview of the product on MS' website: "Before you continue, it is important to understand that the Beta release of any product will not display the stability of a shipped Microsoft product." I'm not sure how to take that....
Anonymous Cowards suck.
That's the beta, released back in July. The final comes out tomorrow.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Am I the only one that thinks MS needs to rename this product. Lets think about it Windows Services for Unix, doesnt that sound like it should be samba.. or something that runs on a unix machine that provides windows services? Really the kit should be called Unix Services for Windows, that makes it sounds like what it is nfs and the rest of posix that windows is missing. The only way it makes sense with their wording is Windows: Services for Unix, but that requires punctuation that everyone has seen fit to drop
One only has to take a step back for a second and realise whats possibly going on here.
Remember when Microsoft renewed its license to SCO for Unix?
I am curious to know if they are now giving it away for free because they don't want to be the company that provides licensing royalties to SCO, or at least keep them to a bare minimum.
Perhaps the side effects of SCO's legal action is free microsoft software. Who knows.....
Not exactly. It is to migrate Unix users to Windows. (i.e. proprietary hardware to x86) It is to prevent them from migrating from Unix to Linux. They have finally resigned themselves to the fact that *nix is valuable: "This is really about the interoperability," said Dennis Oldroyd, the marketing director for Microsoft's Windows Server Group. "Very few of our customers are going to have a pure Unix or pure Windows environment...
Did you ever think 5 years ago that Microsoft would ever admit that their users would have anything but a pure Windows environment? And you missed my veiled reference when I said they will embrace it. They will embrace it - then extend it. That is their M.O.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Did you read the story (or get the email) about MS sending that survey to all of the LUG's......they listened!!!
Take care - RL
We've been using SFU 3.0 and its predecessor for 5 years now to provide our Database Engine and Tools on Windows Boxes as well as our usual Solaris, AIX, Linux, Unixware and SGI. I woudl like to think that by now I am one of the more experienced Interix developers kicking round. I have to say, It's really very good and keeps getting better. MS are moving to being Unix by stealth, SFU is a unix on the NT Microkernal and it doesnt suffer from Win32 issues. Fork works, You can delete a file thats in use (yes inodes work !!), create a new one with the same name and open that in a different process. I've seen Interix 2.0 evolve info SFU 3.0 and 3.5 and I've had MS fix bugs in the allocator part of MMAP within days and release a private patch. Somehow I think there is a little group of diehard Unix lovers in MS working to turn everything on its head the same way Apple got OSX. Anyway waffle over - Try it as a build environment it's geat. What I want to see is Wine on SFU - then All windows apps work over X - whoopee.
And seems like cheap options have long been available DOS/Windows NFS clients for a long time. In 1994, this summary mentions XFS (shareware NFS client from Germany, not the SGI filesystem) TSoft and Sun's PC-NFS.
Nowdays you also have at least these option, and you are right, many are not cheap.
- HummingBird $300 My past impressions were always of good quality and features.
- Reflection $88 I know this name.
- ProNFS $40 (shareware?)
- DiskAccess $179
- SuperNFS $160 Found with google.
I only heard of the first two. The rest found with Goggle.I went to the microsoft site to download this thing but it's only beta. The real deal still cost $99, so the question is WHEN WILL IT BE FREE? Microsoft SFU download
I use NFS under Linux for /home mounts and such and have found it to be extremely reliable in over five years of daily use, but NFS won't let go of removeable drives, so it doesn't work well for sharing automounted CD-ROM, floppy, or zip drives. For those, Samba is the way to go, and with pre/postexec settings, Samba will automatically mount/umount the drives so autofs is not needed on the server side.
"Except for the $150 worth of Windows you have to buy to run it, of course."
I'd rephrase that to something more along the lines of "Except for the $150 you have to pay for Windows." I'm hard pressed to say it's actually worth $150... but that may just be me.
] D
As an example, you can change all registry entries pointing to a user's home directory by running
A Usenix technical conference paper describes the tools and a number of applications.#include "/dev/tty"
But, does it come with ed, the standard text editor?
ed, man! !man ed?
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Microsoft is reminding me of a heroin dealer more and more.
.Nyet. I can guarantee that it will not be that 3 years from now. (Or it will not be compatible.) They have to have something to keep you buying the latest version. Developers get led by the nose just like anyone else in the Windows world.
"The first one is free."
I suggest that anyone who is planning on moving apps to Microsoft check on how much all those additional licenses will cost you. Microsoft is the master of the hidden cost. "Client Access Licenses" for every service you want to use eventually adds up to a big chunk of change.
And then there is the shifting nature of development in the Windows world. Every year or two it is a different set of prefered developer technologies that you are expected to use. This year it is
Anyone who ports applications over to Windows either has a fool for a client or is a fool himself.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
NFS shares show up under the network neighborhood, and you can mount them to a directory or drive letter just like you can SMB shares.
Hmmm. Maybe it is you who is high.
From the acl(5) man page:
Linux Access Control Lists implement the full set of functions and utilities defined for Access Control Lists in POSIX.1e, and several extensions. The implementation is fully compliant with POSIX.1e draft 17; extensions are marked as such.
There are (as noted in other replies above) several Unix and Linux filesystems that implement ACLs with dynamic inheritance.
As for your left nut, you can keep it -- in a vice.
RHCE; are you certified? Karma: ambiguous.
Vim is incredible and GNU/Emacs with the JDEE is a fantastic Java development environment.
But seriously...my sig does not say "their IDEs suck...", it says "beware their IDEs"...they rope you in and tie you down:
Ever tried developing a decent plugin for their IDEs (think SCC: the version control API)?
Ever worked with someone who only knows MS IDEs and try to work on something "different"?
Ever tried to develop an "open standards" application with their IDE?
More than 15 years of development on their "IDEs" and they still don't have a decent REGEXP search-and-replace...don't have "keyboard macros"...still don't have very effective mouse-free (i.e. keyboard exclusive) navigation.
So yes, they have done some very nice things in their IDEs. But you compare VI and Emacs , which are extremely powerful editors that now have compiler/debugger (IDE) capabilities to MS IDEs which are very powerful development environments with a low-end editor. (Yes, VI and Emacs now have Intellisense too).