“UWIN or Unix for WINdows, is developed and released by AT&T Laboratories and David Korn – the creator of Korn shell. UWin basically consists of a set of tools and libraries which helps application developers compile and run Unix applications natively on windows. The tools include a complete shell (Korn Shell) for Windows which is bundled with all the command line tools you find in Linux/Unix.”
as a windows user it’s nice news.
if you want unix command line tools in win32, take also a look at http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
As a windows user, I have used UWIN for quite some time in the past. Though I have switched to dual booting windows and linux ever since. But I can vouch that it served the purpose very well.
Also the korn shell that is bundled with it is worth trying out. It is the same korn shell that you get in Unix.
I think instead of trying to develop a new shell (I don’t remember the name) , microsoft should incorporate korn shell in Vista. Why re-invent the wheel?
I think instead of trying to develop a new shell (I don’t remember the name) , microsoft should incorporate korn shell in Vista. Why re-invent the wheel?
Vista client and server currently includes the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA), an updated and enhanced version of Services for UNIX that first shipped with Windows Server 2003 R2.
Vista client and server currently includes the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA), an updated and enhanced version of Services for UNIX that first shipped with Windows Server 2003 R2.
What does that mean? Is that similar to UWIN or something different ?
What does that mean? Is that similar to UWIN or something different ?
The goals of allowing compilation and execution of UNIX applications on Windows is similar. I’m not familliar enough with UWIN’s implementation to compare architectual differences. SUA is basically the latest evolution of the POSIX subsystem on NT. It comes with C and Korn shells, and like UWIN, does not include an X server, though several are available.
More info here: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/695ac415-d31…
What does that mean? Is that similar to UWIN or something different ?
SUA is useless if what you want is cygwin/sfu/uwin like environment. It is just a minor tune to the old posix subsystem + NFS client/server. No *nix tool is included, not even a simple shell. You still need to go online and download *nix tools separately.
When MS tout R2 I was really excited about “tight unix integration”, expecting things like “bash shell here” or intermixing of win32/unix commandline program. The end product is however nothing more than separately installable NFS drivers……
Microsoft Services for UNIX (SFU) and the newer Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) are different from UWIN (or cygwin for that matter) in one very significant way. UWIN and Cygwin are both Win32 implementations of the UNIX APIs, essentially emulating (via shims and other tricks) the UNIX environment and APIs. SFU and SUA take a different approach, implementing the UNIX APIs and services as a separate (but equal) subsystem within Windows.
There any many consequences of this difference and depending on your needs, one solution or the other will suit your needs. For instance, if your UNIX-based application performs lots of fork’s and exec’s (essentially spawning lots of processes), then SFU/SUA may deliver better performance, since they use the native implementation of fork/exec where UWIN and Cygwin have to emulate this behaviour using the Win32 APIs. In the past with SFU, there have been instances where using something like Cygwin or MKS is a better solution and SFU. Some of those situations will change with SUA, since there are some pretty significant changes to the capabilities that SUA bring with WIndows Server 2003 R2 and Vista.
Either way, each to his own. SUA is now part of the Windows Server shipping product and SFU continues to be a free download, so choose accordingly. You can also visit http://www.interopsystems.com for a list of additional tools and libraries that extend the functionality of SFU beyond the packaged CD. And, contrary to what other’s have posted, there is more to the SUA functionality than NFS (which isn’t actually part of the SUA). Explore the Windows Server 2003 R2 Disk 2 (hey, R2D2!) and install the separate SUA components.
There’s some good information on SFU and SUA available though http://www.windowsforunixpros.com
Ditto the unxutils recommendation. I use a few tools from there to automate the backup of some websites – wget.exe, zip.exe, etc. It’s nice to have grep in windows too, and ls.exe so I don’t constantly get “Bad command or file name” when trying to view directory listings.
This has been around for a long time, I believe it was held back originally by the restrictive license used by AT&T (now it’s more free) especially for the Korn shell.
For me UWIN seemed a lot slower than cygwin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ ) and if you’re going to run any X11 apps cygwin’s a better choice. Of course cygwin is Linux not Unix based.
Of course cygwin is Linux not Unix based.
In what way?
IIRC Cygwin was developed by Cygnus which was either bought by or was owned by Red Hat, who developed Cygwin, and used their own software in various places…. I maybe wrong but this is what i recall
Is Cygwin actively developed anymore ? There was once a rumour that you could install and run KDE using cygwin. I wonder how much of it is true….
Is Cygwin actively developed anymore ? There was once a rumour that you could install and run KDE using cygwin. I wonder how much of it is true….
You can ( http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/kde3/screenshots.php )
I’ve run XFCE on top of cygwin myself, it’s pretty cool. Handy too if you’re in a situation where you have to run Windows but like to have access to Linux command line and graphical tools.
You can ( http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/kde3/screenshots.php )
I’ve run XFCE on top of cygwin myself, it’s pretty cool. Handy too if you’re in a situation where you have to run Windows but like to have access to Linux command line and graphical tools.
So how much effort did you put into running xfce on cygwin ? Just curious. I mean was it easy?
So how much effort did you put into running xfce on cygwin ? Just curious. I mean was it easy?
It was just a question of adding a new server to the cygwin installer and installing the packages from there. It was easier than installing it on most Linux distros at the time.
Take a look at http://cygwinports.dotsrc.org/ if you’re interested.
It seems, KDE support for cygwin has been stopped once and for all. Check the following link…
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-cygwin/2005-September/003009.html
You can even run your X server without a root window in Cygwin, so you can run gui Linux apps side by side with your Windows apps. Don’t recall exactly, but I think it may just be a matter of running X with the -rootless option.
http://x.cygwin.com/screenshots/cygx-rootless-WindowMaker-20031224-…
You can even run your X server without a root window in Cygwin, so you can run gui Linux apps side by side with your Windows apps. Don’t recall exactly, but I think it may just be a matter of running X with the -rootless option.
This is the default now.
Also, Cygwin is Unix, not linux. {edited – I should say unix-like, I doubt it is “certified” as Unix}
And yes it is still actively developed.
Edited 2006-01-16 21:18
Also, Cygwin is Unix, not linux. {edited – I should say unix-like, I doubt it is “certified” as Unix}
Not exactly from the Cygwin website http://www.cygwin.com/ :
“Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:
A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
A collection of tools, which provide Linux look and feel.”
It is Linux like insomuch as it uses Bash and the GNU userland but of course it does not use the Linux kernel it just provides a Linux like POSIX environment which you can also get on Unix systems ie. Debian GNU/BSD or AIX 5L in its Linux compatability mode.
Edited 2006-01-17 13:12
From looking at http://www.cygwin.com it would appear that there have been two updates to the cygwin dll in the last week.
[Tyr.] For me UWIN seemed a lot slower than cygwin.
I run a large text processing shell script (mostly awk)
on the same laptop in AT&T ksh/UWIN and cygwin,
UWIN ksh is significantly faster, to the point that
I believe soemthing is seriously wrong in cgywin or
at least the pdksh/gawk in cygwin.
Since your experience is different, I think each may
have their strength and weakness.
cygwin is certainly a more comprehensive environment.
However if all I need is ksh and usualy script tool,
I will choose AT&T implementation based on my limited
experience.
[Tyr.] Of course cygwin is Linux not Unix based.
This just doesn’t make sense.
You can probably say sygwin is GNU based.
I run a large text processing shell script (mostly awk)
on the same laptop in AT&T ksh/UWIN and cygwin,
UWIN ksh is significantly faster, to the point that
I believe soemthing is seriously wrong in cgywin or
at least the pdksh/gawk in cygwin.
Interesting. I never use pdksh myself, I prefer either the AT&T ksh which you can also run under cygwin or zsh. Although it’s certainly logical the AT&T versions would be faster, after all they wrote the damn things.
Anyway I never ran anything more than very basic scripts, I was talking more about user-responsiveness than processing-efficiency.
This just doesn’t make sense.
You can probably say sygwin is GNU based.
That’s what I meant. I could care less about the whole “Linux is just the kernel”-debate.
You might also want to take a look at Windows Services for UNIX which Microsoft has provided as a free download for a number of years.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sfu/default.mspx
I know UWin has been around for close to 10 years, maybe longer. I got a tech suport job for a different Unix-to-Windows porting software company because I was aware of both products back in 1997. Yes, just knowing about the products was enough to get me the job. (;
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has used UWin and SFU (which is for porting from Unix to Win as I understand it.)
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has used UWin and SFU
I’ve tried SFU. The best way I can put the experience is s – FU!!! SFU isn’t meant for anything more than the most simple command line programs. It’s worthless for any real applications.
Linux is a kernel. Cygwin is based on GNU, the UNIX-like tools used by Linux distros like RedHat.
SFU is based on BSD, presumably because of the more liberal license.
I assume UWin is based on AT&T UNIX.
The company I work for use a product called MKS Toolkit from Nutcracker software.
Our main product is an Oracle application – apparently they tried SFU, but POSIX applications built on there don’t link reliably with the Oracle libs.
Nutcracker is really nice though – faster than UWIN (and theres support), has telnet, ssh servers – comes with Xvision (but I haven’t used it much)….
Company has a big pool of licenses so I’m not sure how much it costs, but if you have to use windows for whatever reason I think it would be worth the cost…
[edit: links:
http://www.mkssoftware.com/products/tk/ds_tkdev.asp
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=1471/urm0000a/0000a.htm
although at $480 for 1 user its a little expensive…]
Edited 2006-01-16 23:28
From when Windows NT was first developed it has had a POSIX subsystem which allowed applications to call standard UNIX (i.e. POSIX) API. In fact, Windows NT also had an OS/2 subsystem, and even Win32 is implemented as an API subsystem, although it happens to be the default. The Windows NT subsystem model turns out to be a very elegant design that the Windows NT developers intended to assist corporations and perhaps government bodies to migrate machines using “legacy-architecture” x86 binaries to Windows. This is the exact same capability that FreeBSD and NetBSD “compat” libraries provide. Similarly, Solaris allows you to run Linux-x86 binaries inside Solaris without being in a container with the same “compat”-like technology. Note, this is not VMWare, or Xen technology, but merely implementing another Operating System’s API like the GNU Wine project is working on.
Microsoft SFU is a set of UNIX programs compiled against this POSIX.dll already in your machine. However, one important note worth mentioning here is that Microsoft SFU refuses to install on a Windows XP Home machine. It requires Win2000 Pro or WinXP Pro. The reasoning is that it is meant to entice sysadmins to migrate to Windows while still having that UNIX-like experience on the command-line.
That being said, to get the true UNIX experience on Windows XP Home, (if you don’t want to fork over excess of $200 for a Pro license for that brand-new laptop that had XP Home bundled with it…), then you’ll have to use Cygwin, UWIN, or a number of other packages. As said above, some people might claim that Microsoft SFU is cripple-ware because of this silly limitation.
According to UWIN’s website, UWIN re-implements the POSIX API, which in my initial view may be overkill based on the fact that the API is already licensed by Microsoft and sitting on each machine (POSIX.dll). However, perhaps it was re-implemented because of Intellectual Property rights:
Another interesting question nobody has yet asked is how AT&T (indeed the original creator of UNIX) is able to give away the source code to the UNIX API implementation if the UNIX IP was sold to Novell and then to SCO. ??? Maybe since the library was re-implemented from scratch by David Korn and parts contracted out to a company in India… Just a thought…