For a limited time, you can order the full version of Microsoft Services for UNIX 3.0—at no charge (see conditions). A $99 retail value, Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 provides an integrated environment in which to run applications for both Windows and UNIX on a single system. This offer is available only in the United States while supplies last, so act now (offer expires Dec. 31, 2003).Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 offers a full range of cross-platform services that help you integrate Windows into your existing UNIX environments. One of just 10 winners at the 2003 LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 took home the Open Source Product Excellence Award for Best System Integration Software. More here.
Order Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 – Free
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Plus $11.90 shipping and handling ….
Its obviously a marketing ploy to have more people go from legacy Unix systems to Windows, but I still wish this offer was open in the UK.
Its really funny, they call it Windows Services for UNIX when its really UNIX services for windows.
Hey guys, a friend of mine at work picked up a copy for me and I installed it to humor him (in vmware of course). What a pos. It did a couple of cool things though….like give me a korn shell and allow me to make files case-sensitive…but that was about it. The telnet server sucks btw.
~ chris
I looked at the website, and started to fill it out, but eventuallyd decided against it. Does anyone know what this “deal” entails. And what the windows services for unix “experiance” is?
TO Christian Hergert: Is this all Win Ser for Unix is, a bunch of unix utilities???
Thanks guys.
this is better than cygwin how?
Read our review:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3821
Yes Yousef, you are right. It even comes with most of the GNU packages! how great is that!…well, since you can do that yourself, i dont really see the need to pay someone 12 bucks for shipping
but ya, it is mostly just a bunch of utilities.
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090008
lmfao
there’s an OpenSSH port for Windows btw. I’d highly recommend that over Telnet.
does this include a decent X server? I hate the one on cygwin and I haven’t been able to find a good X server to run on windows that doesn’t cost a whole bunch. All I want is to be able to make my girlfriends windows computer a dummy terminal for my server via SSH and X-forwarding. Will this work?
Hehehe
UTDallas.edu? If you went to UT Austin you could tell us how it works.
Hook-um Horns.
Anyway I did spend the 11 bucks and thought I had seen the beta for 3.0 a while back. Now the 3.5 is available for download. Do you think I got took?
Oh well, I will see how far it gets on beos.
utdallas = utaustin – football team;
we have the same courses for the record, I just know little about windows since linux is my primary OS
for the record I don’t think you can get taken by paying 11 bucks for a good software suite (not saying WS is, never tried it). BTW, is UTA the longhorns? I don’t watch football.
(OT)
IMHO X on Win is unpleasant. There are altrernatives.
I find that the Knoppix (full linux suite), or the Slackware Live (lean, mean X machine) distros make for good temp X Terminal solutions. I use ’em throughout the pad here on laptops (I find that old laptops make for good X terminals). I use a Solaris 9/SPARC (Ultra/2) system for app & file serving. Works well, and the laptops can still run thier already installed OS, and in some cases here, they don’t even have/need HDs.
Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 US$ 0.00
Order Sub-Total: US$ 0.00
Shipping and Handling: US$11.90
Order Total: US$11.90
It appears Microsoft had thrown this in as a last incensive for IT manager to hold off on purging windows from their servers.
“Well, lets hold off on the switch to linux till we see how well the UNIX4WIN services work out.. ”
Yo’re ensnared long enough for Microsoft to send you another round of licensing bills
thanx iGZo, I kinda wanted to avoid the whole “your computer is running linux now but it’ll be running windows when your reboot” thing but, it’ll do.
Just kidding ya. Yep, an awful lot of money goes to sports in this town.
This from MS tech site.
“Xterm
The xterm client is one of the X11 clients provided in the Interix product. If you start a xterm with the ‘-ls’ flag,
% xterm -ls &
it will start your current login shell. Remember that your login shell will also read your shell startup file ($HOME/.profile) and your login environment will be set up properly.
”
They didn’t say it but I suspect that you could do what you want if you wanted to recompile. This product is sort of like another product that has been out for a long time. I have it but can’t remember the name. Thought it was like mktools or something. Interix is unix on windows for the most part.
does this include a decent X server? I hate the one on cygwin and I haven’t been able to find a good X server to run on windows that doesn’t cost a whole bunch. All I want is to be able to make my girlfriends windows computer a dummy terminal for my server via SSH and X-forwarding. Will this work?
What’s wrong with cygwins? I use it to talk to my Solaris box and it works fine. I can’t seem to cut-n-paste from Windows to the Sun, but that’s minor.
I did try to run remote X through SSH, but the performance was terrible with Mozilla. However, I suspect that has more to do with the upstream speed of my DSL connection than anything else.
http://www.mkssoftware.com/
mkstoolkit
Eugenia how about an article on that or a head to head compair.
Wonder if they’ll do the same thing in other countries …
I played with it for a bit on a friend’s machine. I ran ‘strings’ on a number of the files, and I found the name ‘OpenBSD’ in several.
Maybe you should try running ‘strings’ and grepping for “GPL”. 🙂
Yes, this is definitely not a secret. This page on licensing mentions the GPL source included,
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/howtobuy/default.asp
And the source is included with the package you buy of course, and available by FTP:
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/Interix/sfu30/
Really, this would only be interesting to me if Microsoft was developing and an entire GPL product.
Is it true that these packages do not offer an SSH server? If so, I find that incredibly foolish that MS would continue such a policy.
From what I’ve seen, SFU3 Gives the following features that aren’t normally avaialble to Windows users (I don’t use Windows, so I may be out-of-date with some of my Windows information here):
– Symbolic links
– Fork()ing
– The ability to delete/move a file while another process has it open for reading (Cygwin can’t do that, AFAIK)
– Signalling
– The ability to ‘su’ (I know XP/2K can do it in the GUI, but not from the command line)
– xinetd for running the Unix services (this makes it a lot better than Interix 2.2 for that kind of stuff)
– some attempt at supporting locales in a normal way
But are the symlinks just shortcuts like Cygwin does? Or is the NT kernel patched to allow this?
The kernel itself isn’t patched, but another layer of abstraction is provided to the kernel which supports POSIX compatibility.
“you can order the full version of Microsoft Services for UNIX 3.0”
Wrong. ‘you’ can’t, if by ‘you’ you mean the available audience for this web page. Only residents of one country are eligible for this offer. It is thus a *national* offer, nothing whatsoever to do with the internet-at-large.
Another2:
Hummingbird X11 for SFU/Interix here…
http://www.interopsystems.com/
Another2, Bob:
Free version of X11R6.5, SSH, GCC, Apache, etc. here…
http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/warehouse.htm
The NT kernel and NTFS supports symlinks natively.
symlinks in NT/2000 are known as junctions or reparse points. Unfortuntely there isn’t a native commandline utility to create and manage them. SysInternals has a utility that I use and I believe the resource kit has one as well.
I’m actually looking for a native version of the Bash shell for windows. Does anyone know if this exists?
You can actually use the RUNAS command from the command line or the run prompt to start a new commandline as another user.
Very usefule when doing admin functions on a machine without having the user log off.
RUNAS USAGE:
RUNAS [ [/noprofile | /profile] [/env] [/netonly] ]
/user:<UserName> program
RUNAS [ [/noprofile | /profile] [/env] [/netonly] ]
/smartcard [/user:<UserName>] program
/noprofile specifies that the user’s profile should not be loaded.
This causes the application to load more quickly, but
can cause some applications to malfunction.
/profile specifies that the user’s profile should be loaded.
This is the default.
/env to use current environment instead of user’s.
/netonly use if the credentials specified are for remote
access only.
/savecred to use credentials previously saved by the user.
This option is not available on Windows XP Home Edition
and will be ignored.
/smartcard use if the credentials are to be supplied from a
smartcard.
/user <UserName> should be in form USER@DOMAIN or DOMAINUSER
program command line for EXE. See below for examples
Examples:
> runas /noprofile /user:mymachineadministrator cmd
> runas /profile /env /user:mydomainadmin “mmc %windir%system32dsa.msc”
> runas /env /user:[email protected] “notepad “my file.txt””
NOTE: Enter user’s password only when prompted.
NOTE: USER@DOMAIN is not compatible with /netonly.
NOTE: /profile is not compatible with /netonly.
runas /user:Administrator cmd
I tried almost every commercial X server for windows and the problem is that the font rendering is just not up to the par. Additionally, they all lack some of the recent X server extensions. Combined with popularity of client side rendering, the performance is just not acceptable, IMHO.
I now just use VNC sever/client for remote X session on Windows
Tim:
There is a bash implementation at the tools/warehouse link I provided in comment #28, but it is for SFU/Interix only. I am unaware of any Win32 implementation of bash for Windows unless you go MKS tools (a commercial product) or Cygwin (presumably).
“Virtual Network Computing” – little did I know…
http://www.realvnc.com/
http://www.expertvnc.com/
Why doesn’t IIS have SFTP? Anyone, anyone… Bueller?
almost thought Gil Bates =~ Bill Gates. thanks for the story.
I wish I could accept and enjoy using their offering straightforward, but something bothers me as always.
If MS finds providing an “integrated environment in which to run applications for both Windows and UNIX on a single system” is a viable offer, then why the heck did they dropped *nix support (Linux, BSD) from their version of Virtual PC? Mr. Gates, do you know how to read <a href=”http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=double%20standard“>… ?
And what, did MS paid SCO some million$$$ early this year to license Unix code so that they can distribute this $99 software (at least for now) for free? How generous. How many days, months, or years will it take for them to sell enough copies of MS4Unix to recoup the money they invested(donated) to SCO, which *incidentally* was about to begin the battle against IBM/Linux/OSS?
That said, I respect business model MS follows. I respect it as much as I admire Steve Ballmer’s slick tongue and Bill Gates merciless business tactics.
After all, the best (and most appropriate) use you can make out of your Microsoft Services for UNIX is to grep “berkeley” in WinNT folder –with all respects to the copyright holders.
ExpertVNC looks, on paper, like a fine product but if you just want to be able to control systems remotely – and save bandwidth, I suggest using the opensource TightVNC which has terrific compression capabilities.
If you like it, please donate a few bucks to the project.
It seems most of the posters see some kind of conspiracy on the part of Microsoft to do evil. Could it be that perhaps Microsoft has responded to customer requests to provide some type of support on windows to help manage mixed system environments? Seems like an awsome deal for $11
>It seems most of the posters see some kind of conspiracy on
>the part of Microsoft to do evil. Could it be that perhaps
>Microsoft has responded to customer requests to provide some
>type of support on windows to help manage mixed system
>environments? Seems like an awsome deal for $11
Yeah. Microsoft has offered this product since 2000, although not this cheaply.
I think what’s setting people off, besides the usual distrust of Microsoft, is the SCO connection. Microsoft’s millions are going to SCO ostensibly for IP licensing, and that points to this software.
This uses Cygwin (the DLL). Not sure if it includes Bash. I’d recommend Bash. Read the instructions, it’s fairly easy. You can also uses Cygwin and use that to install OpenSSH, Bash and some other small things.
http://lexa.mckenna.edu/sshwindows/
I’ve only ran the old project, so perhaps a bit got changed here and there. The old project is available here
http://www.networksimplicity.com/openssh/
There’s no RDP server afaik. But there are RDP clients for usage to connect _to_ Windows servers. There’s VNC (protocol is named different, forgot it for a moment) however. Various projects. Both work ok on dialup according to my experience, YMMV.
Regarding X: Can be done via Cygwin, but is slow (at least with KDE2, but that’s biased because of KDE2):
http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/
There are commercial X servers for Windows. Here are a few:
X-Win32: http://www.starnet.com/products/
SuperX: http://www.frontiertech.com/Product/SuperX/product_details.asp
Omni-X: http://www.xlink.com/nfs_products/Omni-X_Server/Omni-X_Server.htm
eXceed: http://www.hummingbird.com/products/nc/exceed/index.html?cks=y
For a huge list of possibilities see:
http://www.rahul.net/kenton/xsites.html#XMicrosoft
I’ve ran a commercial one which started with a K (illegal, with a crack :o) for a while. It was extremely easy to use and configure with a GUI. Included SSH support. I can’t remember the damn name. It somehow reminded me of Korea. Kerie, Korie, or something it was.
If anyone knows a Free (beer and/or speech; no shareware) X server (and NFS server too) for Windows, with easy GUI configuration (no Cygwin) i’m eager to know since it would cooperate nicely in a heterogene network with X servers. Nice to be known.
One interesting product is WeirdX. This is a GPLed JAVA X server. I never got it running, but there was a site where one could run a desktop remotely for free (beer) therefore i was able to run KDE 1.x remotely and experience it while i ran Windows 95, or something. I don’t know wether this site still exists or how slow WeirdX is, but since Java runs on various platforms this X server runs on various platforms too, including Windows.
http://www.jcraft.com/weirdx/
When i’d be facing this problem (wanting to run a X server on Windows) i’d try WeirdX first.
G’luck!
Is this cover for MS’s funding of SCO? I gotta wonder what Microsoft’s previous deal with SCO was. Were they paying a hefty royalty for this stuff, as part of the old Xenix legacy? If so, this is a perfect cover story for their recent funding of the SCO FUD-machine: they paid the millions to change their licensing deal and be able to offer this software for free (or nearly free).
See
http://www.sharereactor.com/release.php?id=3517
:-))
is it anything like Unix for Windows or (UWIN) http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/ ?
…is that WSFU allows you to centrally manage the passwd file through active directory, which is a very cool function when using unix boxes within a Windows domain..