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More Unix Tools Coming To Windows 10 (neowin.net)
Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates brings news about beta 4 of Redstone (the Spring version of Windows 10's Creators Update for 2018):
- Beta 4 of Redstone aka Build 17063 includes BSD utilities bsdtar and curl from the command prompt and Unix sockets (AF_Unix). These are also rumored to be part of a future version of Windows Server.
- WSL will now run background tasks and will continue to run them even after the command prompt window is closed...
- A previous story mentioned a discovered OpenSSH for Windows... OpenSSH and VPN can now be accessed via PowerShell in remote connections via the PSRemote commandlet. With the extra background support added you can for example keep a Secure Shell session open on a server/client and reconnect later.
- Also a tool is available called WSLPath to convert Linux to Windows path options
There will also be some graphical Windows Shell improvements with Microsoft's design language, and "Timeline," a new way to resume past activities...
- WSL will now run background tasks and will continue to run them even after the command prompt window is closed...
- A previous story mentioned a discovered OpenSSH for Windows... OpenSSH and VPN can now be accessed via PowerShell in remote connections via the PSRemote commandlet. With the extra background support added you can for example keep a Secure Shell session open on a server/client and reconnect later.
- Also a tool is available called WSLPath to convert Linux to Windows path options
There will also be some graphical Windows Shell improvements with Microsoft's design language, and "Timeline," a new way to resume past activities...
Ta for the environment!
Qubes Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)
https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/
Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
https://www.cygwin.com/
Give them a few more decades and they might finally support remote displays.
Hah. The new generation of Linux programmers do their utmost to destroy that in Linux, with "hot corners", no lbx or X fontserver. In fact, I think you'll have a hard time with many of the "modern" Linux flavors of running anything except a video streaming application like a VNC client. At which point you might as well use Windows.
They even took way the little [v] and [^] buttons in the scroll bars. When a web browser was jammed up with downloading content, I could still scroll up and down with those little buttons. Now the scrollbars just look broken.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Nobody is being forced to install the Linux subsystem for Windows. Only people who want it. For me it makes Windows a lot more tolerable, and it means I don't have to give up my familiar tools when I boot into that environment.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Will 2018 be the year of Windows on the command line?
Nitpick/Pedantry:
It's not "beta 4 of Redstone"; version 1803 is codenamed Redstone 4 (RS4). 1709/Fall Creators is Redstone 3 (RS3), 1703 was RS2 and so on.
Windows 10 Preview builds don't have beta designations, only a build number, and eventually release candidates which have the final release build number but aren't necessarily individually numbered themselves.
When I was using Windows I always had Cygwin installed, and when I switched to using a Mac one of my favorite aspects (seriously) was having a real shell and all of the unix utilities again. While Cygwin works, the integration with Windows was never great (perhaps that changed over time) and I seem to recall having to use c: or something like it so the mapping to the filesystem was annoying.
I use still like curl, vi, emacs and even grep/sed/awk stuff all the time still, not to mention shell scripts - maybe Windows power users have been getting my with PowerShell, but it just seems super unlikely. Hope they enjoy the new utilities.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why stop there in your indictment? Remember the bastards took away the Meta key too.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Remove the Windows 10 built-in spyware and I'll consider running the Windows operating system on more than zero computers again.
1. Slow to start a new process
2. Slow as molasses file system as compared to the Linux file systems.
A combination of msys, mingw, cygwin, etc. was the minimal support of a partial linux over windows. So, it was very slow when many processes were created.
With the next update Indiasoft will install a new form of their keylogger. By now they have a nice income stream from NSA and FSB. Both care about your text.
From the parent comment: "Windows 10 is a true nightmare OS, ..."
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made.
Windows 10 shows you ads while you are trying to work. But, at least at present, you may be able to stop the advertising: 7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you, and how to stop them.
Can't wait for Microsoft to go all the Unix way. Especially when it comes to UAC.
In particular for cloud computing, and acknowledges the long matured superiority of Unix(es) in that regard.
I notice this in the relative ease to use and automatically install stuff on newer Windows running on virtualization environments, at least compared with the older versions, which were cranky and prone to failures when trying to automate software deployments, just because the OS wasn't designed to be fully usable with shells/terminals.
Of course, Linux and the Unix(es) still are much more stable and usable than Windows in automation environments, but the Windows family is improving.
Have had unix tools for 40 years already, no need for a newcomer.
So enlighten me on the advantages of X compared with VNC? Thank god Wayland is dumping all the legacy bullshit for people who want responsive graphics and not close to four decades of kludges.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
The first advantage is that you can ssh into a machine on the opposite side of the building (or the country, or the world) and run a graphical program on your own machine. If that program is written using proper X techniques (essentially vector graphics), then the bandwidth requirements and latency are lower and the quality is higher than if you are using VNC that has to render the window completely on the server end, compress it, send it over, and decompress it to display on your end.
./foobar and have the program display on the other machine without any intervention on that other machine. This is more of a niche use, but it is very useful for remote information displays and control rooms. It's a good alternative to the Windows paradigm of adding another graphics card and manually starting a full screen display program and hoping it ends up on the correct remote display.
./graphical_program, the same way as you would redirect it to any other display. This works because the X protocol is shared by both.
The second advantage is that you don't need to remote in. On a high-speed network that you might have in the office, you can say DISPLAY=otherbox:0
The third advantage is that programs written thirty years ago will display correctly and do not need to be recompiled or rewritten to play with the latest and greatest fad. Wayland, Unity, what else is there? SystemD is bound to have a display server pop up at some point.
The fourth advantage is that it works out of the box without requiring (or inviting) a bunch of third-party garbage that's only compatible with itself, costs money, and is fragile by virtue of existing to establish vendor lock-in rather than accomplishing a task.
The fifth advantage is that you can turn graphical applications into background processes by using Xvfb, which you can start as a user process and use via DISPLAY=localhost:NN
The sixth advantage is the big one: it works. It isn't broken. What do you gain by replacing it?
Unless Microsoft starts pumping out MS Unix with a Windows front end, none of the reasons for using Linux, BSD, or another Unix go away. This just seems like it would be cosmetic stuff for geeks who are used to being able to awk grep and sed their way out of most problems.
Unix and C are enablers of the Cyber War Domain.
Algol Mainframes were better than Unix in the 70s.
Linux programs, scripts, solutions, will now be able to interact with Windows and services that are unique to Windows, creating Linux solutions which will depend on Windows to work properly.
That's the extend part.
Twinstiq, game news
Correct versus wrong basic idea, and it works a fuckton better than the mega kludge VNC, especially if you actually try, like using nomachine or similar.
Now, the momentum is all about Cloud. And Windows is not the OS of choice on cloud, including on Azure. Windows is kind of useless.
Presumably, Microsoft will try to offer this as best of both worlds with the hope get an additional 1% market share for Windows on Azure.
I don't care how much they embrace and extend I'll never spend a penny on Microsoft, or use it for free. I'm old enough to remember how they got their monopoly position. An evil corporation run by evil humans.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
It never made sense to me why Microsoft didn't just toss in Unix tools at some point, like around Server 2003r2 - 2008r2.
The CLI tools wouldn't have meant less Windows server or server programs sold on its own, it actually would have meant some marginal number of free Unixes not installed because the existing Exchange, IIS or SQL box had the tools to do the job.
I see a lot of Unix installed because native Windows tools are totally brain damaged and while a Unix instance raises support questions, it's also free and solves the crisis. Later more seems to get installed and less Windows instances as admins and bosses get more confident.
If MS just had bash and tools installed natively, the door wouldn't be left open to a whole other operating system.
There is FreeBSD for the real Unix folks who like the old style documentation and FreeBSD handbook and hate gui things. ArchLinux I heard has the same elitist thing that you can custom configure but a disclaimer I never used that one.
http://saveie6.com/
Another few:
- Remote X works with your window manager. You can choose which windows overlap others, not entire displays. You can minimize them as other window. You can move individual windows between different screens. Dock them.
- Remote X works with your X clipboard. I can mark and paste into or from a remote X window.
- Moving windows around isn't laggy. The graphics primitives are cached (especially with lbx) and do not have to be re-sent as you move a window.
- You don't get blurry text when the subpixel rendering differs between different machines. Because the text is rendered in your own display.
- You don't get flyspeck when the remote side is a much higher DPI than the local side. Or obnoxiously large text when it's the other way around. Because the X server is on your local machine, you are in control.
But I don't hate GUI things. I like it so much that I want my GUI thing when I display remote windows. X11 provides that.
Also a tool is available called WSLPath to convert Linux to Windows path options
Thank the lord!
"Old man yells at systemd"
X11 is a vector protocol unlike VNC. If you use GLX over the X11 protocol, an app can send 3D OpenGL commands over the X connection over a network, this allows you to run apps on a different computer and display them to another computer and do it with a faster speed than a raster protocol. So X protocol isnt just for 2D, and its not outdated therefore, it has been able to do full 3D graphics for a very long time.
Once upon a time the fonts were rendered on the X server, the X client could just send the text and the server would render it. For whatever reason, they decided to change this. This was around the time the Render extension happened. This caused clients to switch to sending font bitmaps to the server and then composite the bitmaps together on the server for alpha transparency support. Alpha transparency could have been implemented on the server side font model, but they chose not to do this. There are some applications for the Render extension for fonts which are used inside a web page and for sending images to the X server and being able to reuse fonts and images on composite operations on the server without having to upload rasterized images everytime the applications window content layout changes, this could actually save resources for network transparency.
One thing that could have been done is to allow uploading of PNGs, JPGs and TTFs to the X server and have the X server rasterize them, this would make things work better over network connections, and allow the client to choose to use server side font rasteration with alpha transparency if the server has the font it needs. As others have mentioned, there was an X Font Server as well which the X server could download remote fonts from.
One of the things we hear from Wayland proponents is X11 hasnt been network transparent. This is not true, even Render should be useable over a network connection since you can upload your images to the server and composite them together on the server, GLX is certainly network transparent. Clients are supposed to be written so they fall back to sending any image data over the socket if shared memory is used. So shared memory while not useable for network transparency does not conflict with it since the client just falls back to sending image data over the wire.
X11 is more flexible than VNC since you can export single applications between different desktop sessions. There are even tools to move an X program from one X server to another so you can switch which computer or display an X program is displayed too. There are X based remote desktop tools. There were even programs like XMX that allowed you to multiplex an X application to multiple X servers simultaneously.
The legacy support in X does not consume a significant amount of resources, its very insignificant, so thats a false canard that should be soundly refuted. The core X protocol graphics primitives are simple and few in number so it takes little code to implement them. Increasingly, as well, there is a move to transition the X servers backend to use OpenGL mesa drivers so the X server will use the same drivers as the DRI programs, so these X 2D primatives will be rendered by the OpenGL driver code, which will avoid driver duplication and means the X 2D primatives and the 3D be rendered by the same code and drivers anyway, so the legacy X protocol support really does not use a significant amount of resources.
A good unix tool.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Ok AC, I'll bite: what do you mean? And are you implying that CygWin was superfluous (before the Linux subsystem came).
There was a brief Linux system for Windows that came out some years--maybe a decade?--ago. My recollection was that it was experimental, buggy, and was removed soon thereafter.
Not evil humans, evil fucks. There's a diff.
1. Right-Click C:\Cygwin64
2. Select "Delete"
3. Empty trash
All done!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
When I look back, I'm amazed by how much bash I've written; it has been a very central tool in my computing experience.
That being said, I think it's a total cockup. Simple things are irritating, and complex tasks that suddenly require a more robust language must be rewritten.
I only bother with [ba]sh because that's what's installed everywhere. If most other people around you speak a shit language, then you've also got to speak a shit language.
Also, the maintainer of Bash has a very antiquated, anti-contribution way if maintaining the code base, delivering only tarballs, large patches, and taking credit for improvements.
MSYS Git, perhaps?
X11 Network transparency is one of these things that's one trotted out in order to build geek creds, but is nigh-unusable crap in practice. X protocol is absurdly inefficient (which is why NX is at least 10 times faster), insecure and difficult to manage, while most app developers don't program correctly for a network environment (very few programs use Xcb to avoid sync latency, or even just use group operations like XInternAtoms).
Just about any real use would benefit from a faster, more secure remoting app. The rest of the 'advantages' are generic open-source or because it's old and existing crap.
This is all just nonsense. I use remote X every day... even between virtual machines. Sure, use a compressor over a laggy network... I used to use remote X on a 56k dial up with that.
Just because you think it's just 'geek cred' and you have no use case for it doesn't make it "nigh-unusable crap in practice", this is provably false.
Again, see above, I prove that it works in practice every. single. day. And have since the mid '90s
Yes. This.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
-- Henry Spencer, programmer
Well, I wrote 'nigh-unusable' not 'unusable'. One _can_ configure it, but it's arcane and I find almost zero use cases for it not better covered by a non-transparent alternative (maybe if you have some very legacy stuff. XDMCP would be semi-useful for chroots if distro updates didn't break the config all the time).
(Excuse my ignorance) Does that include programs written using GTK? Qt? SDL? Tkinter? wxWidgets?
then the bandwidth requirements and latency are lower and the quality is higher than if you are using VNC that has to render the window completely on the server end
That is now true for a small subset of programs written with a subset of tools in Linux. You'll find a lot of what you do in X is now not identical to the way VNC does it, only due to the fact VNC uses compression to speed it up.
GTK/Qt isn't a proper way to write anything. wx does have Motif bindings, and SDL can use glx, so yeah.
Why wouldn't I just run Unix? I wouldn't have booted OS/2 back in the day to run Windows programs.
Hummingbird delivered X windows on Microsoft's platform back in the 1990s.
It was excellent, may I say.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
~childo
@ echo off /S /F /S %%f :dir_not_exist :help_display :end /s /q
IF "%1"=="" goto help_display
IF "%1"=="/?" goto help_display
IF NOT EXIST %1 goto dir_not_exist
cd %1
tree %1
FOR %%f IN (*.*) DO attrib -r -h -s -a *.*
REM Here, you could use cacls or xcacls from reskit to pull or add NTFS rights as needed also... apk
FOR %%f IN (*.*) DO DEL
goto end
echo The specified directory %1 does not exist.
goto end
echo APKDeltree for Windows 2000/XP/2003 by Alexander Peter Kowalski (c) 2004
echo.
echo Usage : APKDeltree [directory] [/?]
echo [directory] - removes the whole directory
echo [/?] - displays this screen
echo.
cd\
REM switch back to root folder... apk
rd %1
REM move %1 > nul
REM Last 2 Lines are for directory/folder removals... apk
REM EXIT
REM EXIT Closes DOS terminal console session window
APK
P.S.=> This can be put into a deltree.cmd file (32/64-bit) or deltree.bat file (allows compilation into an .exe w/ a batch compiler) & poof/voila - you have a working "deltree" command.. apk
actual
Tiny nitpick: if you're using "ssh -CX", you're also having the compression benefit. For a lot of applications, it actually speeds up X11 forwarding quite a bit (possibly because of what you just said; bitmaps images of desktop applications are often very compressible).
And they took away TWM!
Oh, wait. No, it's here. Yeah, just change your window manager to that and you'll have a fine environment again.
QT before version 4 (or 5) was a wrapper around X11 commanfs. After, it started doing its own rendering and sending a bitmap to X11. This was claimed to be a performance boost (though QT3 worked just fine for me) and so it could play with X and Wayland and Unity without recompiling. Now there's a kludge for ya.
I've used Cygwin to add SSH to Windoze boxesfor years, and while a bit clunky it gets the job done. In testing WSL when first announced I was excited to give it a try and then left scratching my head, completely boggled by the fact that WSL is a walled garden that won't allow you to actually manage a Windoze box. I could find no way to access the host filesystem from WSL, much less access administrative utilities, making it a complete waste of time for my purposes. I guess MS decided to move directly to extinguish before bothering with embrace and extended as far as this feature is concerned. Your mileage may vary.
X protocol is absurdly inefficient (which is why NX is at least 10 times faster)
Depends on usage and use case. As others point out, if you're tunnelling over SSH, you get a level of compression for free. If not and you're using it locally, you get the benefit of 100Mb/sec or 1Gb/sec links.
insecure
Who cares? Tunnel it securely and there's no problem. You know what else is insecure? Just about everything. Yet we manage to mitigate it just fine.
difficult to manage
You say that, and what pops into my head is the image of a kid fresh out of school who not only thinks he's invented sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, but the entire computing industry as well.
while most app developers don't program correctly for a network environment (very few programs use Xcb to avoid sync latency, or even just use group operations like XInternAtoms).
Most software is crap. If you're acquiring software for use in remote sessions, that's one of the parameters to check for.
Pre-install the coreutils like grep, gawk, sed, find, cut, head, tail for real usefulness on the shell. I don't mind installing gnuwin packages. I despise having only the built-in find to do any text searches.
Exactly what programs are you running over an X session? Don't even fucking tell me you use it to open a terminal window.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Tell that so the systemd crowd, not me. A separate fucking toolchain for dealing with log files. So you recreated grep, sed, and awk but this time they work on the binary log files. Totally worth it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yes!
The machine I'm typing on right now has two Emacs windows on it served over from a headless machine sitting right next to it. That's the majority of my uses. The transparent clipboard really does wonders for usability there since I can drop text right into and out of those windows from local programs.
Another use case that comes to mind is openning up an email client on another machine so that I don't have to copy over and install SMIME certificates on my own box and can read encrypted emails that way. Don't go after me for compromising security on that...it's done over an encrypted tunnel.
Other than that, mostly programs I wrote myself that were intended to be used that way, hence they were written using QT 3, rather than 4, though both work, the former is faster.
Performance. Bandwidth efficiency. Better integrated. Better for doing things like remote displays from embedded devices.
QT is a hideous viral mess.
Which is far more fundamentally efficient: sending a few specific drawing commands only when something changes? or transmitting multiple bitmaps of the whole screen (even just compressed deltas) every second?
Also,X isupports the resolution of the remote display, and only sends the application's wndow. VNC can only give you the server's whole desktop at whatever resolution the sending side supports. Lets not even get into the associated security issues of showing a whole desktop.
The former.
Except that hasn't been how most Linux apps draw on X for a good 20 years now.
systemd
then some of these tools could be useful to use. People seem to be forgetting how impressively un-trustworthy Microsoft has become.
A lot of this sounds nice, but how can you trust Windows with the forced spying?
if they're remotely displayed, yes it is.