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Ubuntu user space coming to Windows 10(!!)

Elixer

Elixer

Lifer
This is pretty big news...

ELF coming to windows 10? Holy crap.

If you want to hear more, hopefully you'll tune into the Channel 9 Panel discussion at 16:30 PDT on March 30, 2016.

*edit, forgot the link, you can view the talk, since it was already played. https://channel9.msdn.com/#playing

Here's let's break it down slowly...

Windows 10 users
Can open the Windows Start menu
And type "bash" [enter]
Which opens a cmd.exe console
Running Ubuntu's /bin/bash
With full access to all of Ubuntu user space
Yes, that means apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch...
And most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives!

"Right, so just Ubuntu running in a virtual machine?" Nope! This isn't a virtual machine at all. There's no Linux kernel booting in a VM under a hypervisor. It's just the Ubuntu user space.

"Ah, okay, so this is Ubuntu in a container then?" Nope! This isn't a container either. It's native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows.

"Hum, well it's like cygwin perhaps?" Nope! Cygwin includes open source utilities are recompiled from source to run natively in Windows. Here, we're talking about bit-for-bit, checksum-for-checksum Ubuntu ELF binaries running directly in Windows.
Click to expand...

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html
 
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This can't be but good news. Microsoft realized that there's no need to "go to war" against your competitors, it's best to embrace them. It happened with iOS, it happens now to Linux. What is the next target?

Or maybe this is a big April's joke?
 
WOW! This is GREAT news.

Microsoft is serious, about making Windows 10 a sort of "unifying platform".

What with their iOS and Android porting stuff. (Which I thought I heard that they were cancelling? Maybe not.)

Edit: Will they port (or re-write) the common Linux filesystem drivers, so you can access your Linux HDDs in Windows? That would really complete the picture.

Edit: Will we finally see "ZFS on Linux"... for Windows 10??? That would really take things to the next level.
 
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200_s.gif
 
sbpromania said:
This can't be but good news. Microsoft realized that there's no need to "go to war" against your competitors, it's best to embrace them. It happened with iOS, it happens now to Linux. What is the next target?

Or maybe this is a big April's joke?
Click to expand...

No joke, you can test out builds with this working right now.

What they basically did is on the fly translation from ELF to win32, so, lots of stuff that was a PITA to do before on windows is now much easier.
Full ssh support, and so on.
They did state that no GUI stuff works, and that is understandable.

Now, the other really cool thing is, with VS 2015, you can remote debug code on a linux machine.
That means, you can use the very good VS debugger, and step through code, and it will be as if you were doing the same on the linux machine.
 
Can someone please explain to me the significance of this? All I'm getting out of it is that I'll be able to use Linux commands on Windows machine.
 
Anteaus said:
Can someone please explain to me the significance of this? All I'm getting out of it is that I'll be able to use Linux commands on Windows machine.
Click to expand...

Ubuntu for Windows.

Developers won't have to leave Windows.

Microsoft is trying to position Windows to be _the_ platform to build tools and services that will work on every single device and operating system on the planet.

Good strategy.
 
sbpromania said:
Microsoft realized that there's no need to "go to war" against your competitors, it's best to embrace them.
Click to expand...
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish",[1] also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.
Click to expand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
 
Maybe I'm missing the big picture. People keep saying Ubuntu for Windows, but doesn't this only mean that in the loosest sense? I can see Bash applications running as programs within the Windows environment, but I can't see Unity replacing the Windows GUI. I imagine we are speaking about high level access? The Windows kernel is closed source. How does that affect native bash capabilities?

I guess what I'm saying is that wouldn't this type of functionality affect only a small subset of Linux users, and even then only those who feel VMs are a limiting factor. Given the importance of sandboxing, doesn't this actually pose a new risk to system stability/security?

Don't get me wrong, I think it's really cool. I just think its funny that the most commercial Linux company is joining up with the most commercial closed source OS. Maybe Canonical is hoping to get more market share this way?
 
Mentioned right in this thread, no GUI stuff.

Links provided that likely answer your other questions, I don't know them off-hand. I'm excited enough. I might not need to keep a VM around on my laptop for coursework anymore. It screws with my WiFi every now and again. And it will be nice to have HDD space back.
 
It is mostly for developers. People that develop websites/app backends in ruby or node, they can use this to develop, test, then push to the cloud all from a windows desktop. This is currently difficult/impossible to do, hence a lot of people use Macs which you can do this on.
 
Yes, it's not going to change Windows for normal people. But if you understand Microsoft as a company over the years, this is a very fundamental and amazing thing and indicative of where hte company is going.
 
I've seen a lot of people talk about how they may consider switching from OSX to Windows now because of this. I can't say I've ever used OSX but that does appear to be an interesting trend if true.

What sets this apart is you can run the linux binaries straight from the Ubuntu repo, completely native on Windows. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I'm not sure about the compatibility of it but I expect GUI stuff won't work too well or at all. Also this is not intended target Linux in the server world so Linux is very much still alive there.
 
New builds now out to the public with this ability: 14316

You do have to turn it on... via enable Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta).

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsex...ncing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-14316/

Run native Bash on Ubuntu on Windows: In this build, you can natively run Bash in Windows as announced last week at Build 2016. To do this, you first need to turn on Developer Mode via Settings > Update & security > For developers. Then search for “Windows Features” and choose “Turn Windows features on or off” and enable Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta). To get Bash installed, open Command Prompt and type “bash”. For more details, see this blog post. https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows/
Click to expand...

Finally, they also have dark mode themes. 🙂
 
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Once I get some time, I'm totally doing this! My regular workflow is on Mac OS X just for its terminal/bash/unixy-ness, then I target and deploy to Ubuntu. I would absolutely switch back to Windows if this becomes stable!

For me, nothing beats Windows for productivity. That's just me; everyone is different. This looks like I could have my cake and eat it too!
 
Been playing around with it for an hour or so and I'm super giddy, it's all been working flawlessly.

I run Ubuntu on a VM to do my C programming, the only thing different from Ubuntu was GCC and make weren't already installed. Git, GCC, make, gfortran, BLAS, and LAPACK/E had no issues installing. Once I cloned my repos and ran make to recompile, all my C programs ran flawlessly.

The only thing that's a bit weird is the file structure, the "default" folder is your user account folder, /mnt/c/Users/<username>. When you do cd it takes you to some weird place, not back to /mnt/c/Users/<username>, so I'll have to figure that out...
 
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slugg said:
Once I get some time, I'm totally doing this! My regular workflow is on Mac OS X just for its terminal/bash/unixy-ness, then I target and deploy to Ubuntu. I would absolutely switch back to Windows if this becomes stable!

For me, nothing beats Windows for productivity. That's just me; everyone is different. This looks like I could have my cake and eat it too!
Click to expand...

I think this might be better than on my Mac since it seems to be full featured Linux, the biggest issue I have using my Mac is lack of apt-get (yes I know there is brew but it's missing a lot of stuff). To get the gcc compiler you have to install xcode, and there's a bunch of other things like gprof and valgrind that are harder to get running on the Mac.
 
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slugg said:
Once I get some time, I'm totally doing this! My regular workflow is on Mac OS X just for its terminal/bash/unixy-ness, then I target and deploy to Ubuntu. I would absolutely switch back to Windows if this becomes stable!

For me, nothing beats Windows for productivity. That's just me; everyone is different. This looks like I could have my cake and eat it too!
Click to expand...

This post....screenshot it and send it to MS. You are EXACTLY why they're doing this. 🙂
 
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