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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.
Interesting. No, wait...that other thing. Tedious.
Anybody else first read that as STFU? Seems oddly appropriate somehow.
Apple went to BSD.
Novell is going to Linux.
Windows...? It's the next generation. They just won't admit it.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Woohoo! Now I can write UNIX code to run on Windows! Then in twenty years or whenever Longhorn is released, they can change the standard, and I'll get to choose between compatibility with my UNIX code and UNIX, or Windows! This is great!
From the article Microsoft is set to include its Services for Unix (SFU) add-on for Windows as an integral part of the next major release of the Windows server operating system, codenamed Longhorn and expected in 2008.
Oh really? That's fantastic, especially since it's something - by the article's own timeline - that won't be here for another four years.
Some analysts said the move could eventually sideline conventional Linux and Unix operating systems.
Someone must have a pretty fancy crystal ball to tell us what is and isn't going to "sidelined" four years in the future.
By including SFU in Windows, Microsoft could rapidly become the biggest supplier of Unix software if Longhorn proves a success, undermining traditional Unix vendors such as Sun, HP and IBM, as well as Linux vendors' enterprise offerings.
Um, someone is forgetting about the single largest shipper of UNIX* systems in the world: Apple, which eclipses all other vendors.
In fact, Microsoft's move is aimed at two things primarily: Linux and Mac OS X, both in the server environment and on the desktop. Both OSes are making serious and impressive inroads in areas where they've never had large showings: Linux on the desktop, and Mac OS X in the datacenter. Microsoft, of course, sees this - given Gates' recent diatribes about the "dangers" of anything open source, or anything non-Microsoft - and we can leave it up to brilliant journalists to spread FUD to help hawk a product that won't ship for almost half-a-decade.
Microsoft may also release a 64bit version of SFU this year.
Oh really? That's wonderful news, considering we've already got that support with various commercial and non-commercial *NIXes and Linux for quite a while. Again, Microsoft, with the aid of journalists, pulling the normal "hey, you might be able to do X now, but in a few years, you'll be able to do it with Windows Amazing Edition even better! So don't invest in anything else, just stay with the perennial safe refuge of Microsoft!"
* Yes, yes, "UNIX-like".
longhorn:~# cd / er, no, I mean, cd \ ... I mean ... ohsodit
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
http://www.cygwin.com
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
Finally, I can run my linux apps in a secure enviorment.
This Shut the Fuck Up technology sounds interesting. Can I use it on an airplane or bus when people around me too loud?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
"SFU is not shipped with Windows because SFU currently contains open-source software, such as the GNU C compiler, which cannot be distributed with commercial software."
cue sound of one hand slapping forehead...
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
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."
All the simplicity of Unix.
All the stability of Windows.
Didn't somebody at Microsoft think to reverse things? They'd be furthur ahead to try to fix what they have before adding what everybody else has.
This is interesting.
For a while now I have used some OSS-community applications on my Windows 2000 Office desktop by running binaries compiled under the Cygwin Linux environment on Windows.
the concept of having a Linux application which could be compiled under Windows from the same codebase (subject to dependencies and X-server requirements being met) may be very appealing to the Opensource groups who have been issuing software tor Mac OSX by this method for some time.
I also wonder if this is intended to give Windows more access to certain Scientific/Media computing markets which are dominated by *nix systems (industrial renderfarms, for instance). Either way, I can only see this as a good thing.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
> SFU is not shipped with Windows because SFU
> currently contains open-source software, such as
> the GNU C compiler, which cannot be distributed
> with commercial software.
Where's that clue-stick of mine? I feel the need to beat someone over the head with it.
"So, how did you compile KDE on Windows?"
"SFU, noob!"
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
A hack is just an idiom waiting for wider use.
SFU is not shipped with Windows because SFU currently contains open-source software, such as the GNU C compiler, which cannot be distributed with commercial software.
How does one become VUNet writer? Is there a rigorous screening process involved? Is any knowledge of them computer thingies required?
Finkployd
Some "analysists" say that something Microsoft might do sometime in the future might (or might not) hurt Linux deployments.
Some people think SFU is really cool.
Microsoft might upgrade SFU to 64bit sometime in the future.
SFU lets you run *nix apps on Windows.
There, now you don't have to wait for that page to load.
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.
All of MS's own software is written & tuned for the NT kernel, so switching to a different kernel would mean a rewrite of MS-SQL and so on.
Furthermore, there's nothing technically wrong with the NT kernel that would justify such a huge change. It's much easier to put Unix on Windows than visa-versa.
Unix To Beef Up Longhorn
I can't believe I didn't see it at first!
BR Get it? Beef? Longhorn? Eh? Oh, forget it.
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".
Right now Interix is based on an enhanced POSIX subsystem. It's outside of Win32 and Interix applications are only indirectly subject to the "features" of the Win32 subsystem.
Jason Zions, a solutions architect at Microsoft, said there are development versions of SFU that enable a single process to run code both from Windows and Unix libraries. Currently this feature, which would dramatically ease integration tasks, is not available in SFU.
This would almost certainly require much more closer integration of the Interix and Win32 subsystems. Oh my ears and whiskers, this can't be good.
This includes servers. There are now over 12 million Mac OS X systems in use (source: 23:40 of WWDC keynote). This by far eclipses shipments by all other UNIX/UNIX-like system vendors. Apple is the single largest vendor of UNIX-based systems in the world, bar none.
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.
It consistently astounds me how Microsoft talks about what they're going to release four years from now. Apple doesn't even talk in advance about what they're going to release next week or month (the recent iMac fumble notwithstanding), let alone the fact that four years in this industry is decades on a conventional timeline.
Do you think Bill is trying to pull a Steve on us here by talking far in the future, cementing our notions of Microsoft as a gargantuan buffoon, while secretly planning to abruptly and with much fanfare unveil Longhorn on store shelves by, say, Christmas?
-b
myselfmusic
an application...
running on user mode linux...
running on a host linux...
running on VMWare...
running on Windows.
So, what's the "platform"? (Extra Credit: If the application is a web-services solution, what's the "platform" then?)
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
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.
"first microsoft gives us bullcrap statistics about how "windows outpeforms linux" and now this? does anyone else find it comical?"
No. This smells more of "make it easier to migrate if you're using *Nix" than "we'll work faster with their stuff". Comical is the use of the acronymn SFU for the services for Unix.
"Derp de derp."
Seeing as the only difference between Windows and Linux that MS cannot erase (assuming they want to make money) is the fact that Linux is free and Windows is not, every other difference they erase brings it one step closer to that being the *only* difference, at which point predictable things happen (this is also why I think Mono isn't a bad idea). In this case, it'll likely cause more people to develop for *nix, knowing that it will still be compatible with Windows (as long as they release the source or provide a binary), which means more applications available for Linux, which means more Linux users, which means less people caring about Windows compatibility, and so on. Vicious cycle, it is.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
Someone must have a pretty fancy crystal ball to tell us what is and isn't going to "sidelined" four years in the future.
No kidding. I know what Microsoft is thinking on this one, and I think that four years is probably too late. It simply comes down to offering a low cost migration path from UNIX. Note that this only affects the server though.
I don't think that it will sideline different Linux vendors, though it most certainly will continue to sideline Sun, if they are still around. Of course Sun is effectively sidelined at the moment, so....
Microsoft's hope here is that they can be the vendor that runs successful UNIX server software and also supports Windows desktops exclusively. It is also aimed at preventing customers from switching to Linux just because they want to run an Apache server.
Of course in 4 years, the computing landscape could be very different than it is now. I suspect that we will be in the middle of a huge conflict the likes of which the industry has never seen. I don't think that most analysts or most managers at MS count on it being as intense as it will.
When I left MS, the prevailing view was that OSS was a pipe dream which could not work in the real world (completely ignoring the success of Apache, BIND, Sendmail, GCC, etc). I don't think that they are conscious of how their pricing model effectively eliminates them from certain markets, such as the ISP market either.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
... "studies" showing that Unix/Linux is slower than Windows.
Why don't they just name it Functional Unix Distribution and get the whole acronym thing out in the open.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This smells more of "make it easier to migrate if you're using *Nix" than "we'll work faster with their stuff".
Remember, that ease of migration works both ways. Now that my family has been using Firefox on their Windows computers they're not so intimidated by using one of my Linux computers for web browsing.
The more *nix software you can get running on Windows computers, the more likely those Windows users can make a seemless migration to *nix without any angst or gnashing of teeth.
Now, if you can only keep developers from using Windows "special features" maybe we'll finally get something close to platform independence.
TW
... they must have violated SCO's IP rights
If you read between the lines this is actually the most insightful point in the comments so far.
If one stops to consider Microsoft's business model it becomes apparent that SFU is a way for Microsoft to attempt to gain IP rights to POSIX compliance. In the beginning there will be incompatibilities and inconsistencies. Microsoft will collaborate with organizations to iron out the incompatibilities and inconsistencies. Through merit of collaboration Microsoft will attempt to patent and copyright their contributions and, with every legal filing, will make a grab for any related material that is possible. The Linux industry, not wanting to be perceived as deliberately trying to undermine Windows, will have to collaborate with the Windows movement. Since Microsoft can afford to patent the contributions and refinements they will eventually nibble away at the GPL.
Essentially Microsoft is hoping to do to Linux what Linux did to UNIX. Microsoft is hoping to spend enough time to rewrite the code, subroutine by subroutine, in the name of compatibility, so that they can divest Linux from GPL. When they have properly divested the system from GPL over the course of five to ten years then they will once again assume market share _AND_ be able to legally make SCO-like IP claims on *NIX systems.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Don't forget that MS once had a Unix OS called Xenix. Then David Cutler talked them into a VMS like architecture...
As Henry Spencer put it "Those who do not understand Unix are condemed to reinvent it, poorly".
We may be seeing the wheel coming around full circle..
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I've been developing some analysis software for the last few months. I'm nearly code-complete but have been vexed by several issues. In particular, I've been wondering how I can bring my software to systems that are routinely rootkitted by script kiddies. Thanks to SFU, I can finally deliver software with the Quality that Windows users Expect.
Windows' strength isn't in what it can run, it's in how easy it is to set up and maintain.
Boy do I disagree. Yes, Linux can be a pain to set up, but unless you're buying a new computer pre-installed and configured Windows can also be a massive pain in the ass to setup. And maintenance for Windows computers, in the form of patch, antivirus and spyware/malware upkeep is more than just a chore.
But the setup part of the your comment isn't what I disagree most with. What I disagree most with is that Windows strength isn't what it can run. Mac people go nuts when you try to put them on a Windows comptuer. Unix folks go nuts when you try to put them on a Windows computer. Windows users go nuts when you try to put them on a Mac or Linux computer. The reason for this is because they don't have the workflow they're used to. The biggest reasons their workflow is different is because they have to use different apps.
People love their apps, even their bad ones, because they've taken the time to learn the idocyncracies of _those_ apps. They still have to learn how the OS works, but if you take away learning new apps the switch is much easier for most people. It's not so much that Windows apps are supperior, it's that Windows apps are what most people know how to use well. If "Windows" apps can also be found on the competitions computers, many more people would feel comfortable about switching.
TW
Once again, a misleading and sensationalist article on slashdot. Microsoft have no plans to make windows "compatible" with linux in the general sense of the word. Nope, they are just planning to include SFU (Services for unix) which has been available free for some time. SFU is literally just that; adds support for linus/unix services enabling *nix style printer queues and general network interoperability tools. It does not for example allow you to run KDE or GIMP or anything fancy like that. It is preposterous to even suggest like these so called "Industry Analysts" are that this is a move my microsoft to enable Linux software to run on windows, and that it is planning on becoming the worlds biggest unix software provider. For the very word "Linux" to be associated with "Windows" is enough to make Bill Gates turn in his grave (if he was dead that is!)
...
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
SFU 3.5 is available _today_, as a free download, no less. I've been using SFU since the pre-3.0 betas. It is wonderful. The announcement here seems to be that SFU will actually get rolled into some longhorn skus, so you wont even have to download the free installer. That means people can expect an SFU environment as part of a given windows install in a few years.
;)
SFU is cool technology - you get real NFS client and server, a real UNIX cmdline environment (much better than cygwin, IMO), full gcc, libraries, tcsh, even x11 libs (but no local xserver). I find that having a tcsh SFU window hanging around on my desktop significantly helps my development process (foreach/grep/find/sed does wonders for search-n-replace on a large code base)
I'm not sure really what the point of your post was, but it mostly revolves around bitching at MS and journalists about a announcing a product plan. You seem to focus on how longhorn wont be here for a while. The specific technology in question, SFU, is here today, and you can use it now if you want to.
Not that that should stop you from randomly complaining about MS though. This is slashdot afer all
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