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Linux vs. Windows: What's The Difference?
underpar writes "This zdnet article covering Microsoft's Tech Ed conference quotes one of the speakers, Mark Russinovich, as saying that Linux is becoming more and more like Windows. He cites many examples of where Linux 'copies' Windows and other operating systems. He says the only current difference is 'how windowing is handled.'"
The article is talking about the Linux KERNEL not the Gnu/Linux system. He's comparing the linux kernel and the windows kernel, and the difference betweent he two with regards to windowing systems is that Windows has windowing operations in the kernel, whereas Linus has it in unser space.
Just a little summary for people too impatient to read the article..
Mark Russinov is the guy from wininternals who have some very cool utilities for windows - frequently mentioned in the microsoft knowledge base. If you're looking for windows utilities to show processes, logged on users, open file handles/mutexes etc., don't look no further.
/etc/ and ~/.somethingrc files can be quite daunting, but it's so much better than the registry in real life situations where things can go wrong and you want to edit stuff by hand or restore stuff, it's just not funny.
Having said that, the talk was about the kernel. Obviously the differences between a GNU/linux distribution and a Windows variant run very deep.
My pet peeve about windows is the registry. Sure, the staggering number of sometimes quite byzantine file formats of all those different
The biggest difference in the kernel would have to be security. Windows has a lot riding on their weird security system with it's SIDs and groups (which isn't enough to actually lock down your users, you need to use funky policies for that), whereas linux usually tries to get by with a simple uid/gid combination. Of course, if you'd want to, you could SELinux the kernel up beyond recognition, when it comes to security. (Try to do that on windows).
Also, printerdrivers don't run in Ring 0. They do on NT (and on windows 2000/XP as well, if you install old drivers. There's no warning or nothing. Yay.)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
in the old days, before windows even existed, there was X1(0|1) and most people commonly referred to it as X-windows.
We even thought it was plagiarism that Microsoft called their stuff "Windows"
But you must be of that young generation that grew up with windows so I guess it sounds strange to you.
Sincerely,
Grandpa
Sure, they're free... but they're also Beta, and the licensing agreement says you can't publish any software you write with the environment. How does that compare to Linux... it doesn't.
Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command?
Uh, yes. Guess what, cygwin has a port of sshd! So yes, you can ssh into your machine. And if you're running Apache (also ported to Windows), you can do just what you described quite easily.
Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones?
Elaborate.
looking for a command prompt? Download Microsoft Unix tools for Windows. You'll get a better integrated variation on cygwin (based on one of the bsds)... it's free for download and works pretty well, particularly for things like grep and awk, which i couldn't live without.
Amazing magic tricks
I'm no big fan of windows, but it seems like you're not really knowledgeable about this stuff.
Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command? Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones?
In essence, yes... and yes. There are probably a few open ssh implementations that run as a service in Windows, just as there is an Apache service. Also of note, Microsoft released a POSIX / UNIX compatibility thing for NT/Win2K/XP (Unix services for Windows? I don't know what it's called.). It's only a few steps then, to get sshd up and running.
As for the web server... "iisreset" I think is the single command. I could be wrong, I don't have IIS installed on my home XP machine at the moment.
Lastly, Windows has a scripting host. You can do nearly everything with vbs. VB sucks as a language, but it's what they chose. I think that javascript might also be available. Anyways... there are scripts out there that let you shut down machines remotely, force the current user to log out, etc. etc. Of course, RPC has to be enabled, but it's all there. If there's an OLE, COM or ActiveX representation of whatever service or object that you wish to work with, you can access it through the scripting host.
I've had to work with Windows boxes at work, so I've had to learn a lot about everything. The security model is really interesting, and can be extremely *tight*, if you wish it to be. You can limit access to almost all OLE/COM/ActiveX objects to groups, you just need to find or develop the right tool.
Yes.... Mingw provides a bourne again shell for windows. Borland provides a free c++ compiler. Java is free (as in beer). Hell, even the MS .NET SDK is a free (as in beer) download, and Mono is a free (as in freedom) alternative that works in Windows.
I don't use a GUI to do much administration in Windows anymore, it just isn't my preferred method. Don't bitch about GUI being the *only* way to do it, since it most likely is not. I'd venture a guess to say that about 95% of everything that you can do with the GUI, you can do with the command line.
Now... creating symbolic and hard links in NTFS, and having the boot partition on a separate HD than your C:\Windows (C:\WINNT) directory, well those are options that you have to go without.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
links have always been part of NTFS, only there are a lackof tools to play with them.
XP has fsutil which you can use to create hard and soft links.
I'm not sure if it works with directories, for that you want a tool that creates 'junctions'.
Apparently the problem with using hardlinks was that programs weren't aware of them - some would always try to delete the file, some would have issues when recursively deleting, etc. I think MS must have put some checking or other work into the system to prevent problems, or they wouldn't have released the tool now.