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Unix To Beef Up Longhorn
An anonymous reader writes "VNUnet has a story about Longhorn having the ability to run unix or linux code via SFU." Microsoft's site has a lot more information about SFU itself. Regardless of ideological bent, it's an interesting piece o' technology.
http://www.cygwin.com
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# Modus Ponens
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Hate to break it to yall, but there have been some VERY nice UNIX(tm) layers for Windows since NT 4.0 The same people that made Exceed X11 for Windows also made a kernel add-in with full POSIX support. All the UNIX goddies where there and it even seemed to increase stability. Microsoft purchased the company after they failed to get their software to run well on Windows 2k (they ran out of money and couldn't afford to redevlope). If they get this stuff working again in Longhorn, I'll be first in line to buy it when its released.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"Zions confirmed that Microsoft is working to replace all open-source code in SFU with commercially licensed alternatives. Last year it licensed Unix software from SCO."
Apple, in unit shipments, is the largest vendor of UNIX systems in the world. They may not be used in the same fashion, but Apple completely eclipses "unix/solaris/linux/bsd" in shipped units, in fact ridiculously so.
"With the release of Mac OS X, Apple became the largest vendor of Unix in the world"
"There are over 5 million Mac OS X users, including scientists, animators, developers, and system administrators, making Apple the largest vendor of UNIX-based systems."
A lot more...
This has been common knowledge for a couple of years now.
I run SFU on Windows 2000 and XP Pro already.
I doubt Longhorn will add anything significantly new to this.
For what it's worth, it's a pretty good POSIX layer with a rather good ksh implementation.
It also appears to be more stable than Cygwin, and more palatable to corporate IT departments who have a tendencey to shy away from "those crazy open source guys".
I have seen sfu in operation, including the (latest) 3.5 release, and it is still an incomplete and ugly to use kludge. While cygwin itself is a bit clumsy, sfu is even worse.
/, and I have found no way to change this since it does not use /etc/passwd. Yet, it sets my HOME environment variable to something else based on the Windows USERPROFILE. Since ssh uses the one from getpwent, it of course uses /.ssh rather than what is in $HOME. By contrast, cygwin gets this right by creating a /home file layout and using the userid to form home directories for each user which match up both in what the getpw.. calls return and what $HOME is set to.
/dev/fs/C. Also, cygwin handles directory paths that include spaces in their filenames gracefully, sfu does not.
Of course it does not bundle many common and nessisary things like gcc, most gnu tools, cvs, ssh, or bash. You can get these from a seperate site (interopsys), but most of the standard things still require patches before they can be successfully compiled and used on sfu. In this sense, even at 3.5, sfu offers a lower level of compatibility with existing unix sources than cygwin does. As such, there is still no version of libtool that will build shared libraries on sfu, although this can now be done successfully with cygwin.
In addition to being incomplete, sfu offers no x server. cygwin includes xfree86 now. To get X under sfu, the only options are commercial, and expensive.
Finally, sfu integrates poorly in many ways with the win32 environment and with unix. For example, sfu insists internally my home directory is
Next, there is still some basically broken stuff related to file permissions between sfu and mswin. For example, I downloaded a tarball into the sfu file system from both exporer and firefox, but the permissions sfu saw for the saved files were ---, no r/w anything for anyone! At least cygwin and mswin do interoprate on files at this level!
Both cygwin and sfu mangle file names and file system layouts in complex ways. However, cygwin does a better job of this. I can use c:/ in cygwin, for example, but my only choice in sfu is
Finally, I had sfu 3.5 lock up on me, and it took down the entire machine. I have had older versions of cygwin lock up on me a few times, but they never killed the machine.
All in all, I have found even the latest and greatest SFU a very ugly and just barely usable kludge. Cygwin, while certainly not perfect, is far more usable and useful even before considering that cygwin is also far more complete in what it does offer out of the box. Cygwin is a very underrated tool in this respect.
There is valid historical reasons for this. The first versions of SFU contained an NFS and NIS server so that UNIX clients could connect to an NT Server. Only later were "Unix Services" added to the product.
Zions confirmed that Microsoft is working to replace all open-source code in SFU with commercially licensed alternatives.
That would be entertaining, considering that just about every userland component of Interix has OpenBSD copyright notices in it. Take out all the Open Source from Interix and you'd have little more than the "kernel" left.
If they're really talking about doing that, and perhaps replacing it with the code from Unixware... I don't think commercial UNIX or Linux have anything to fear from the result. I've used Unixware, and it was less than impressive.
Of course this is a minimal POSIX environment, while SFU includes things like networking, X, NFS, etc. In other words, minimal POSIX compliance has always been available, SFU has existed but cost money since 1996, has been free as of this year, and will be enhanced and included with the OS in the next version.
SFU only provides partial X support. Something about licensing issues and X servers. They also don't include an SSH server becuase of fears of a conflict with SSH, Inc. And despite the fact that WIndows uses Kerberos for integration, their telnet server and client (from SFU or just the OS) don't try to use it for encryption.
Last I heard, there was talk about the latter, but who knows if it will come to anything.
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