Testing the Windows Subsystem for Linux(blogs.msdn.microsoft.com) |
Testing the Windows Subsystem for Linux(blogs.msdn.microsoft.com) |
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13697918
[1]: https://www.andreas-jung.com/contents/dont-use-docker-in-git...
Or after they bought Skype, and rebranded the unrelated Lync as Skype for Business. Not to mention that Lync is a homophone of LINQ, which was coming out around when Office Communication Server became Lync...
Or lately, when you had Visual Studio 2015, and what is now Visual Studio 2017 being called Visual Studio '15 while it was pre-release.
Naming things is hard.
↑↑↑
Bikeshedding
↓↓↓Now who can come up with the justification for an abbreviation of "whine"?
Edit: seriously, I'm just kidding
They justify their choice saying they had a survey where the most popular option was Bash for Windows. Well, surveys also led to a boat called Boaty McBoatface...
A glorious name and a perfect example that surveys are a good idea. So - what's your point?
Some details at http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-testing.html
I wonder why they went that route instead of contributing to LTP directly?
While there's probably some edge cases specific to WSL, surely much of their increased unit test coverage would be applicable beyond WSL.
[1] https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-con...
benhills describes the cause:
For some context, I've looked at what causes this slowdown. For some reason stack has mapped an mind-bogglingly huge region of memory (I'm talking dozens of terabytes). When we fork we walk the entire address range to set up the new process's state. We have a design that should vastly speed this up, but we're approaching "pencils down" date for Creators Update.
The damned terminal kept making characters disappear! I actually thought my interviewer was inadvertently deleting characters, or maybe trolling me.
I had to switch to using an actual Linux system.
MS have a ways to go before getting this right. I daresay I'll be on OSX by the time that happens though.
Now that everything was published they also plan to pre-install the diverse arsenal of hacking tools on every machine, as there is no reason now anymore to hide that stuff - what will make the fight for freedom much easier for everyone involved!
To support your patriotism there will now be a personal statement of all past MS CEOs showing up on startup and the national anthem playing to support your emotions.
Also from time to time a screensaver will show the sentence "Everybody adores you, because you belong to a global hacker elite using the Windows operating system in 2017! Ignore that laughter around you!"
I would love to see terminator or a more advanced terminal.
Mostly curious about Vim/Tmux, and having serve operations spit out the server into the actual Windows browser?
I did read something about the creator update adding 24 color support.
I'm less sure about things that require a GUI, and last time I tried postgres it didn't work. That was a while ago, though, and they might have made progress since. TFA says the postgres tests are passing.
> having serve operations spit out the server into the actual Windows browser?
I'm unsure exactly what you mean. But you can absolutely run web servers in WSL and connect to them from any browser running on Windows.
In my experience, you can connect to any network services running on Windows from Linux (for example, I connect to the Docker for Windows daemon) and vice versa.
I'm curious, does the WSL actually use any parts of Linux under the hood, or is it just an emulation of the user space, like Cygwin?
It traps the software interrupt which initiates a system call under Linux and the Windows kernel takes over, emulating that system call.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, a version of GNU which is widely used today is often called WSL, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is an NT, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. NT is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. WSL is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with NT added, or GNU/NT. Windows 10, the so-called NT distribution, is really a distribution of GNU/NT!
(Sorry for the copypasta, I couldn't resist.)
If MS had actually ported the GNU base system to NT, then you could reasonably call it GNU/NT. They have not done that.
Microsoft cannot say it loves Linux until they launch their flagship products such as MS Office and MS Visual Studio on Linux. Until then, it's all fugazzi.
MS SQL Server on Linux was good progress.
It seems like your comment was meant to troll, but in the odd chance you're interested, you can follow a lot of these changes and the decisions behind them where Microsoft documented the process on the old Engineering Windows blog, and well as more recently at the main Windows blog itself.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-a...
Sharing files across the two systems was (maybe still is?) disastrous. I've heard of total Linux system corruption, but I personally had files disappear (they were checked into a remote git repo, so no loss, except for recent changes). It's covered in the docs, but I didn't grok what they were saying and the real gravity of it. Since I was using Windows native Atom for my editor, this was cumbersome.
But, most things work about how you'd expect them to. I was able to install the software I work on (which runs as root, and pokes at everything on the system), and it worked as I expected it to. I didn't even have to tweak it.
I'm still more comfortable and productive in Linux, so I'm happy to have my Linux partition running well again. I also prefer Fedora to Ubuntu, so that's a win for running Linux natively. But, if I liked developing in, say, Visual Studio, and was deploying my software to Linux servers or working on cross-platform desktop apps, having the local Linux would be a big win. Even with the forced separation of filesystems, it's still more transparent than a Vagrant managed VirtualBox, or something.
Also worth noting: Windows is remarkably better as a development environment than the last time I had to develop on a Windows machine (about 10 years ago, one of my jobs included building cross-platform software packages). The quality of tools available is very high. There are good terminals, all of the languages I use have good installers available. Even if Linux weren't there, it's much less painful to develop on Windows than it used to be. (Still painful, and I still had a huge variety of headaches, mostly due to absolutely shitty package management on Windows.)
I don't think this has ever been true. Just don't jump through the hoops it takes to modify Linux system files from Windows - that stuff is hidden from Windows apps for good reason.
If you need to access files from both, store them in a normal Windows place like "/mnt/c/...". E.g. in my WSL home directory I have symlinks to my Windows Documents, Downloads, Development, etc. folders. I constantly operate on the same files from both OSes simultaneously, and it's fine.
Can you name some good ones? I am sick of putty/cygwin :(
But it's made my laptop a far more pleasant place to get work done if I need to do so, and generally works far better than I was expecting it would. I no longer feel compelled to run a VM on my laptop to get real work done.
Can you replace Ubuntu? Maybe, if you are OK with 14.04 LTS level support. Certain simple things straight up don't work -- you can't send a ping without an admin level windows shell (sudo wont do it either). You also won't magically get driver support for hardware that works in Linux, but not Windows (if you think this isn't a thing, try plugging in a random USB-to-something adapter without finding obscure, broken, or nonexistant drivers on Windows). If you just need access to some tools that only run on Linux, I've found WSL invaluable, so long as those tools are available on Ubuntu 14.04.
Can you replace Linux in general? Nope - I'm a 90+% Linux user for work and home, and neither Debian, Ubuntu, or its derivatives work for me, with the notable exception of some server and embedded applications. If you want a wide variety of up-to-date software, there is no replacement for something like Arch.
The latest Creators update uses 16.04 LTS.
you can't send a ping without an admin level windows shell
The latest Creators update supports ping as a non-admin.
---
I would say that for most usages it is a good replacement for vanilla Ubuntu. Microsoft is quickly closing the gaps in support. Most stuff simply works (albeit disk filesystem I/O is still a bit slow). For instance, I used it to compile packages for Ubuntu 16.04 and upload it to a PPA without much trouble. At the time the only change I had to make was using fakeroot-tcp rather than regular fakeroot. But maybe that is fixed now.
It is especially useful if you like to work in a Unix, but also need Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, or other applications that are not available on Linux.
Fair enough. I specifically mean, can I replace Ubuntu for development work?
Can I use apt-get to install various tools? Does docker work better? That sort of stuff.
What's the use of Linux syscall -> NT syscall translation if not compatibility with developer tools, most of which are GNU software?
https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows
(He proofread, and I made suggested changes.)
I'm a supporter of the GNU project but I'm very ambivalent about its communication strategy. I posted this because I think it's as true for GNU/NT as it is for Ubuntu, which is... technically true, but hard to talk about without sounding off-putting.
:(
I can't really imagine people running anything other than development tools on WSL, and most of those come from the GNU project.
Out of curiosity, is progress on WSL bound by any blocking issues in particular, or could your team benefit from more resources being assigned to the project?
Maybe I'm naïve, but I tend to view WSL as a perfect way to win over a ton of developers who are becoming disillusioned with macOS, but are hesitant to run bare metal Linux due to the headaches involved (insofar that macOS and Windows "just work").
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/windows-10-creators-update-downl... (Warning annoying video plays with sound)
They mention X/GUI support in the "What's new in Bash/WSL" article[1].
> Note: Some of you may also have been following along with some intrepid explorations into running X/GUI apps and desktops on WSL. While we don’t explicitly support X/GUI apps/desktops on WSL, we don’t do anything to block/prevent them from running. So if you manage to get your favorite editor, desktop, browser, etc. running, GREAT but know that we are still focusing all our efforts on delivering a really solid command-line experience, running all the command-line developer tools you need.
[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/04/11/wind...
I did know that, but the update only came out today AFAIK, and is being slow-rolled out (I checked all my Windows machines today, none updated). People with enterprise/business versions of Windows with "Defer feature upgrades" aka "Current branch for Business" enabled also wont get it for a while. I know how to force the update, but forcing Windows updates is something I've learned better than to do.
As an aside, I would highly reccomend WSL users check out wsltty[0]. Gives a better terminal than Windows' built-in 'cmd', with options to open other shells like fish/zsh/etc in arbitrary directories.
I've seen numerous reports of other folks entire Linux filesystem being corrupted beyond use. So, I'm not alone in doing this...and (at the time) the docs had a single (non-threatening) sentence about it, when I went back to see if maybe I'd missed something. It basically said something along the lines of "this doesn't work", rather than "this will destroy your files".
It's not a big deal. It was bleeding edge stuff when I started playing with it; things go wrong, and I expect things to go wrong when I'm on the bleeding edge. I like where they're going.
But, it's a thing to be aware of. I wasn't aware of it, based on the docs I read on the subject, so I mentioned it, just in case someone else might not be aware of it.
The thing is, I'm not a Windows user; things that may seem obvious to a Windows user (like, "those files aren't obviously visible for a reason and that reason is don't touch them!") are not always obvious to me.
Then again, you're not the first person to say the files are "hidden"; but I was able to find them, probably using the "find" command in the git or cygwin bash shell, or something (I dunno what else I'd use to find them), but maybe using system search. I don't remember...it wasn't a momentous occasion. I just wanted to edit some files in Atom, so I went and found the files I wanted to edit, using some tool on the system. Again, I don't know Windows. If the state of these files was somehow telling me not to touch them, I did not pick up that signal.
It was configurable...but, sometimes I needed one of those other shells to get something done. So, I left them alone.
I wonder what would have happened if the MS product was called say WinOS and the other one LinOS, where none of the terms are common words so that similarity would be the only matter.
If you like, it's the same as the ways of running GNU on the FreeBSD kernel; there's Debian/kFreeBSD, which is Debian compiled against the FreeBSD ABI, and there's the Linux compat layer that can run Linux ELF binaries unmodified. Both of those are legitimately GNU/FreeBSD systems (or subsystems).
http://serverfault.com/questions/767994/can-you-run-docker-n... has a good set of answers.
Other languages use multiple words or different cases for some of these situations. English leaves it ambiguous.
It is a bad name that is bad English. It was bad when it was "Windows Services for UNIX" too as an aside.
such as python, nodejs, elixir and PHP?
EDIT: Yes, there are non-GNU Linux distributions, but WSL is based off Ubuntu specifically and ships with a GNU userland by default.
The point is compatibility much more than CLI UX. The ability to run that nodejs or Python project even though one of the 1352 subsubsubdependencies has a bug on Windows.
I don't see the value if it's not more stable than "excentric" platforms like Cygwin and MSYS, but I guess I wouldn't use it either way because there's no way I'm installing Windows 10 on my hardware.
I thought Cygwin was very stable and included most things you could want, while also supporting Win7/8, which are the last versions I'm willing to run on my hardware.