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SUA Deprecated In Windows 8?
An anonymous reader writes "I just tried to install Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) on Windows 8 Preview and found that it's marked as DEPRECATED: 'Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is a source-compatibility subsystem for compiling and running custom UNIX-based applications and scripts on a computer running Windows operating system. WARNING: SUA is deprecated starting with this release and will be completely removed in the next release. You should begin planning now to employ alternate methods for any applications, code, or usage that depend on this feature.'"
first :)
Why not just use Cygwin or better yet just use Linux.
I guess they want to come out with a new "metro"-version.
Why would someone use SUA, which is only contains very old versions of the software it bundles? There is Cygwin, which is a much much better alternative. Sometimes, even MinGW is a valid alternative because it generates a native application (though it requires some porting effort, which may be unacceptable in many cases).
Cygwin or UnxUtils work great.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I feel like we're dealing with the old Microsoft again.
As MS cannot compete (and never could compete) on technical merit, of course they have to remove any compatibility with industrial standards they can. This is a leftover from a time when MS thought they had good technology. By now they know they do not and never will.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Seeing it more and more frequently since Taco left is getting really tiresome. Give it a rest.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I think Cygnus Solutions solved your problem about 20 years ago.
My alternate method is Linux...
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Do you have a credible source stating that it will be removed in the next release? Deprecated usually means that the functionality is being replaced by something new. Your warning for people to make plans for alternate methods seems premature.
Honestly it makes sense to drop support for SUA. Stay native on their own homegrown stuff and let people who need it run full-on linux in Hyper-V.
Well, I actually failed to find a project that would really depend on SUA. Anyone knows about anything that would be harmed by this change?
... one person who actually uses this?
Other than the author of TFA.
Even MinGW has to be more compatible with modern unix/linux than SUA.
This is how it is with microsoft. You cant rely on ANYthing from them - they can just shut down or bail out on you (bcentral, silverlight, soon .net), and you will have to spend a lot of time and funds to go around the pain they cause you.
Read radical news here
Watching Microsoft lately, it seems likely to me that Microsoft is starting to use its current OS hegemony to make coexistence with other OS's increasingly difficult. Some minor anecdotes: our current corporate email system is from MS. Most employees access it via webmail. Lately MS has made it nearly unusable on browsers other than Internet Explorer. It was always less than ideal using Firefox to access it, but now it requires re-entry of the password nearly every minute. The password reset utility requires a silly workaround, requiring a browser restart. I personally don't use this system, but other users will likely be irritated enough to fall back to using Windows, rather than their Mac laptop. The corporate Wifi network also seems Windows-centric, with the login process being cumbersome on non-windows laptops. The recent Slashdot posting about new Windows 8 PC's having the potential to lock out other operating systems also gives me chills, and fits my hypothesis.
During its rise to power, Microsoft was known to use technical sabotage to destroy its opponents. It would write its OS in ways that would cause competing software to either crash or run sub-optimally. This, along with deeply unethical business tactics were largely responsible for Microsoft's dominance. I am sceptical that Microsoft will be able to succeed in preserving its current dominant position. Much of the computing world is now based on the web, where more open standards are often demanded. However, that doesn't mean that MS can't do harm trying to hold on to its dominant position.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
We opened a case with Microsoft awhile back regarding this issue. A high level manager called us back and begged us to find another (non-Microsoft) solution. The team is going away and soon.
Other than the LDAP extensions SFU/SUA added to the active directory what else was really used from it? It seemed to me that anything else you would use from it would be better handled with a real UNIX or Linux install, either on it's own box or in a VM.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
There are serious licensing issues involved with using cygwin - anything that links to the cygwin1.dll is tainted by the GPL and it's source must be released. You can by a license from RedHat, but it is very expensive. MKS had a competitive product that didn't have the licensing issue (although you had to buy runtimes for each machine or machine instance you wanted to run you app on. Will cygwin even work under Windows 8?
The ONLY way to run any Windows OS is under a real OS like Unix.
I got tired of re-installing the Windows for my In-laws every time I visited since they invariably managed to get their system infected with various little nasties even after I installed every type of protection I could think of - proving "there is no patch for human stupidity." Finally I was fed up and installed Fedora - could have used any Linux version but I had the DVD for that with me. Installed VMWare on it, and installed Windows under it - got it to the point where everything they use was baselined and created a snapshot. Now when they call about not being able to print, or any of a dozen other things, I walk them through reverting back to the baseline and branching. Then when I arrive I pull all of their data from the dead-branch onto a new clone and start again. Makes life so much easier when you use Windows for what it should be used for - just for the computer illiterate... If you assume it will be compromised, and become useless, you can plan accordingly.
Now to be fair I have several Windows OS boxes at home that never have these problems. But then, I try to minimize my target foot-print as much as possible, whereas they use MS products for everything, including IE and Adobe Flash - so there isn't much that can be done to reduce their target foot-print. MS isn't EVIL - it's just an inherently unsafe OS. Nothing wrong with that. Since they make money off it without having to perform, there is no reason for them to create a product that is more secure.
Is this a shock to anyone after The Week of Windows 8 Hype? If there was a theme running through all of the stories it was this: Windows as you have known it is deprecated, a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it but don't expect it to last much longer. If Windows and native Win32 executables themselves are on the chopping block why would they have any interest in maintaining a UNIX command line layer?
Win32 (and UNIX more so) isn't going to lend itself to the sort of app store lockdown Microsoft is moving to. If you have a choice of buy Win32 apps/games at Walmart/Gamestop and Microsoft gets no taste of the action or buy everything at the App Store and give Microsoft 30%, which do you think they are going to 'nudge' you toward? And by 'nudge' I mean turn your PC into an iPhone with hard crypto locks and remove all options that do not let them rake off their 30 points.
Democrat delenda est
They provide other Unix features as part of Service for Unix. Are they keeping these? Among these are the NFS Server, NFS Client, Password Syncing tools, NIS Servers and telnet server.
Now a lot of these are a bit 90's Unix, telnet not SSH and NIS. But I've found the NFS Server is pretty handy sometimes.Even though they don't seem to exactly rush to update last time I looked (i.e no NFSv4).
If you look at the kind of work Microsoft has put into the Linux kernel recently relating to Hyper-V...
https://lwn.net/Articles/451243/
One might gather that it's not worth the trouble for NT to ape Unix anymore. Chances are pretty good Linux is the new SUA and virtualization will be the new supported solution to this problem. I mean, why should Microsoft bother maintaining its own Unix tools when they're actively maintained elsewhere? Given the work they've done on both virtualization and linux integration I would say that there's no great conspiracy here.
So, many people keep wondering why use SUA vs Cygwin?
Well, first off the basic thing is speed. SUA has kernel hooks for syscall translation. It's able to do many of the POSIX syscalls in a much quicker fashion than Cygwin. Cygwin, on the other hand, does *everything* for POSIX syscalls in userland, causing it to be slow (for example, a fork, at times can take *seconds* to complete).
So, SUA is much better this way... problem is, it's tricky to get things to compile for it, I never did get things building reliably for it. Cygwin has a full suite of programs already built, and it's much easier to build existing Linux/UNIX/POSIX programs for than SUA.
Being a Windows user who needs *NIX tools for many processing tasks, what do I use? Cygwin. Easier to set up and get running. The speed drives me insane, though. My login script, which runs many programs before bringing up my bash prompt will take 5-6 seconds.
Ideal solution: Hyper-V or some other VM software running a VM in the background that I can get a terminal to, that has filesystem access to my system drives too.
I think this is yet another indication that SUA is pants and everyone should be using Cygwin.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Windows-only shops may tolerate you insisting on SUA, because it's a Microsoft product.
Start talking about CygWin or VMs and their eyes glaze over, they suck their thumbs, and moan "Wasn't on my MCSE, hippies will eat me, wasn't on my MCSE, hippies will eat me."
I know that there's not really any significant difference in support terms (other than not getting the flakey almost-POSIX and BSODs that continue to burden SUA), and that they'd be better off switching to a native POSIX environment anyway, but the man with the ear of the man with the money doesn't want his "skill" set to be devalued overnight. And that's why SUA still has (had) a place.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
They've killed it by only supporting the features necessary to re-share existing NFS services using SMB and AD. Integration of Windows with non-AD LDAP and Kerberos is virtually non-existent and requires a ton of work and 3rd party utilities to get it working. I don't think NFSv4 is even supported.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Or is it odd numbered? But like Star Trek movies, every other version of Windows (desktop) is crap:
Win95 - meh
Win98 - not too shabby
WinME - oh my god, no!
Win XP - not half bad
Win Vista - 'nuff sed
Win 7 - okay
Win 8 - it's gonna suck, right?
why support something that your new os's 'made for' or 'works with' branding program is designed to kill?
...Which can be seen by viewing SUA based process in Windows's Task Manager.
Do this:
1. Install SUA
2. Run KSH (the command line shell that SUA installs)
3. Open Task Manager
4. Change the columns so that 'command line' is showing.
You will notice that the SUA processes have _wrong_ (corrupted?) information displayed. This is based on the fact SUA is a different _subsystem_ and stores process based information (specifically, command line information) in memory in a _different_ format than the _Win32_ subsystem.
So when a Win32 process tries to access a SUA process...and there's no checking for a process' system type...
photo shop / the adobe CS pack is a big windows and mac app that will not work good with a touch based ui (maybe for a photo shop light), also it has lot's of 3rd party plug ins' (I hear that the MS app store is more open to that then the apple one). Also big screens and dual or more helps with it as well.
AutoCAD is a other high end app that needs a good input, good CPU + GPU, big screen / dual or more screens and there even high end mouses for it http://www.chipchick.com/2007/08/spacepilot_makes_life_easier_for_for_3d_modellers_and_cad_artists.html
Now a touch screen for input (only) for AutoCAD / Photo Shop may work but when it is off to the side and not part of the main screen.
I say if MS fails adobe CS and AutoCAD for Linux as apple is out due to the app store and apples lack of good hardware for Business like no real server. The mini server and mac pro server fail in many ways. Like no dual nic's in the mini. Lack of hot swap hdd's in both and Lack of dual PSU in both.
Also apples desktop hardware is very over priced and the imac screen is not that good for pro work and the hard to get to (vs all other pc systems) HDD in the imac and mini is a no no for some Business. Now the mac pro will be nice at $1000-$1500 with be more up to date come on 1TB HDD and 3 GB RAM at $2500? Can build a i7 system (same cpu power) with more ram and a better video card for about $1000 or less or even get's dells for about $800-$1500 less then apples price.
Troll much? But let's take a refresher course, ten years later.
1-800-what-model-is-that? I worked in the 1980s on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean input methods. CJK input was a time-limited product, completely dependent on Microsoft, so of course we got eaten when they folded CJK fonts and IME into the operating system.
Your sentiment really pissed me off, because a lot of people gave blood to bring Microsoft down a peg or two in the 1990s so that in this day and age young people might suppose you actually know what you're talking about (other models existing, as they do now) when you spout nonsense like that.
Watcom C/C++ was a superior compiler, but it got eaten alive by Visual C++, a product which set the C++ language back by almost five years by pretending to support standard features, but then only implemented namespaces one level deep, and cutting ever other corner in the template system a harried reviewer would miss on the first day (that was policy in all of their development plans).
It was as if Visual C++ promised support for K&R C 100% except that nesting of curly braces was only permitted in main(). Nesting braces aren't very important, there are work-arounds. We'll get to it in a future release. Meanwhile: 1) Put your entire program in main(); Cry baby. 2) the comma operator is your friend; 3) assign variables within the expression of first use; 4) write your program in FORTH and cross-compile; achieve code re-use through the use of the #define facility; use VBASIC instead, it has no pretense to scale, and can't hurt you.
Until Microsoft, nobody dreamed what you could do with the CPP in a pinch. If Google Code had existed in the late nineties, #ifdef _MSC_VER would have made the Google Zeitgeist.
There's no denying the colossal stupidity of many of Microsoft's main competitors. I've even read comments by Microsoft execs who basically said "we were amazed to watch our competitors blow themselves up". So true.
They never said that about Netscape. But what's one set of Nixon tapes among friends, anyhow, or forged video tapes submitted to the U.S. Justice Department?
You need to bone up on game theory. After destroying a well-managed competitor funded on a world record IPO through a multitude of dirty tricks, a lot of smart people wandered around in a daze dialing 1-800-what-model-is-that?
Top three fatal flaws in a 1990s era business model if your potential competitor was Microsoft:
1. Revenue
2. Market share
3. Profit
I recall it was the shops who were most dependent on Microsoft who made out best. Visio was an extremely well behaved ISV and they were ultimately rewarded for their OLE monstrosity. Is that what you had in mind? The independence of toady-hood?
There used to be a lot of government contracts that required a POSIX compatibility, which was why I thought SUA was available. I wonder if Windows won over the Uncle and those are no longer caveats.
I have never seen one instance of this actually being used in any environment from small up to very large enterprise.
VMware workstation running one of the many "live" distributions as a mountable .iso image.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
That's why you just format the drive and install your favourite *nix distro! :-)
Everybody stupid enough to buy Windows 8 should have no truck with UN*X or Linux at all! Thank you, Bill!
> Win 8 - it's gonna suck, right?
Yep. It's inevitable. I think the even/odd thing is that in release (a) we try new stuff, and in release (b) we fix/withdraw it, and then in release (c) we try new stuff again, so it tends to devolve into even=suck odd=less_suck. Or the other way around, depending on if they start at "1" or "0".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Is there a real use for it on Windows? I am serious and not trying to be a troll.
The issue I see is that not everything is a file on Windows. Can I grep processes and threads? No. Can I awk, sed, and grep device driver files? No. Can I even parse logs? No, they are xml on Windows. etc.
Sure I can run gcc and maybe xclocks or something, but that is not usefull.
Can I do anything with it? Powershell seems much more integrated and you have .NET and WMI to automate some tasks. It still seems far behind Unix with the utilities though, but I am not an experienced Admin. Windows!= Unix.
http://saveie6.com/
All I really use Cygwin for is a bash script interpreter. It's done a fine job of that, though it does take an abominable amount of time to start a console window.
It lets me write cross-platform database installation scripts for *nix and Windows, but to be honest, that's about all the use I have for it at this time.
I haven't even bothered updating the install in over a year. Why bother? It works.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Remember when NT was going to be a better Unix than UNIX?
I guess that is now going away - what with GNU/Linux and Apple being UNIX these days.
The SUA community has been hoping for a while now that Microsoft just open-sources the stack - everything about the NT kernel - and lets the community maintain it rather than actually killing it. Ideally they would open-source it but continue to maintain and update the code, but the truth is that SUA has gotten fairly little love since Vista came out. They add features and fix bugs, but slowly - 64-bit shared libraries from GCC has been in the works for a while, now. The Win7-update of Interix (the SUA "OS" environment) didn't ship until well after Win7 itself was generally available (although you can install Interix 6.0 on SUA 6.1 just fine).
It's actually really interesting what it does and doesn't have. It's available in 64-bit, including utilities, libraries, and build toolchain, but if you're running on 32-bit it still doesn't have the 64-bit extensions that enable things like working with files more than 4GB in size. There's still no support for clone(), which makes a lot of Linux source code not compile on Interix. There's no direct access to physical block devices, which means you can't use Unix disk utilities, and no audio support (though you can use a network-connected sound server that runs on Win32).
Open-sourcing SUA would allow people to fix many of these issues (seriously, how hard can block devices be? Map \\.\PhysicalDisk0 to /dev/sda, and you're much of the way). It would allow resolving the silly little issues, like the poll() implementation being half-baked and therefore requiring a portability library that implements it using select() instead.
Seriously, this is a win-win. MS doesn't have to support it anymore, the people who use it can continue using the MS version or the new community version (or modify the community version for their own purposes), those who want to tinker and hack on it can make improvements, and MS can get some good press for open-sourcing a (fairly low-level, even if rarely used) component of the NT software stack.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
While on the face of it, it was an ego thing that they were smart enough to have this compatibility layer. Then when I looked deeper, it turned out they had a bridge between active directory and NIS. But looking even deeper, it only worked with AD as the master and NIS in slave mode. Why am I not surprised. So if you basically had a Unix shop, and was using NIS, you could still consolidate credentials for both the Unix world and the Windows world, but only by making Windows the big dog. Again why am I not surprised?
Just never seen or heard of an installation. Every Windows shop I went, when they wanted a UNIX tool they either used a Windows port of it or installed a *NIX machine.
aka STFU
This brings up another question - NT originally was POSIX compliant. Has that been true since XP? Also does dropping of SUA mean that Windows 8 will no longer be POSIX compliant? If XP was POSIX compliant, one would think that Hyper-V would be as well, right?