“Microsoft announced that version 3.0 of its Services for UNIX (SFU 3.0) package was released to manufacturing this week. SFU 3.0, one of the key products developed by Microsoft’s India Development Center teams in Hyderabad, India, and Redmond, Wash., is being offered to meet the growing demand of UNIX customers wanting to take advantage of Microsoft Windows 2000. SFU 3.0 is a breakthrough version that incorporates new tools for rapid migration to Windows 2000 as well as new features for tighter platform integration in mixed environments. SFU 3.0 enables customers to optimize their previous investments in UNIX infrastructure, applications and people, while capitalizing on the value of Windows 2000 as an enterprise platform.” ENTNews has an explanatory article about this too.
Microsoft Services & Integration Solution for UNIX 3.0
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Eugenia Loli
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I wonder from which UNIX are the people migrating to Win2k??
When I last checked out Interix 2.2 (the subsystem part of SFU), it was officially POSIX.1 and X/Open UNIX95 certified and I read that it was based about 85% on BSD with the remaining parts being AT&T-like.
The source for the included tools was available from Microsoft on CD also (separately).
The IRS successfully ported a 1.2 million lines-of-code application from Unix to Interix and deployed it on 30,000 desktops, so it definitely seems to work.
http://www.tpi-inc.com/Docs/customers.asp
And at $99 a pop, it’s as cheap as Red Hat – my copy is on its way in the mail right now.
I spent two months on a school trip in Hyderabad, India, during summer of 2000, and interviewed several students at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT). Both IIIT and the University of Hyderabad (where I took classes at) primarily used Linux to program on. In the course of my interviews, I talked with a student that worked at Microsoft’s Hyderabad’s facility. He did not provide my with any information on what they worked on (NDA) but I always wondered. Now I know. If you want UNIX programming people, pick up a few post graduate Computer Science students for India (Especially Hyderabad)
Links:
IIIT – http://www.iiit.net
University of Hyderabad – http://www.uohyd.ernet.in/
“While Microsoft’s Miller confirmed that the Interix part of SFU 3.0 can run Linux applications on Windows, he declined to get drawn into a discussion of the scenario.”
Does anyone know if he is talking about binaries or just recompiled source?
everything to GNU/Linux or even Solaris instead of have a layer over a layer just to be able to say that the application was ported (sort off) to W2K?
And it is funny to see that even if the layer is new… it doesn’t support Windows XP…
Cheers…
P.S.- and the price tag isn’t $99 only… add to it the cost of W2K… after all you need it to run the “layer”…
“Support has been added for Windows XP Professional and Windows .NET Server, which isn’t expected to ship until 2003. “At this point, we don’t see any issues with supporting Windows .NET Server,” Miller says.”
Microsoft also told me that Windows XP is supported.
It runs binaries and can copile source code (gcc, visual c++ among others), NO EMULATION is a realtime subsystem like Win32. Supports running daemons as services and it inherits kerberos auth, really cool!
Other cool stuff:
– Sync passwords with NIS / yellow pages
– NFS server and client (you can cluster NFS services)
– Uses BSD sockets over TCP/IP Stack
– Win2000 and up supported
Is this like Cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/ (runtime environment plus ported UNIXy utils) or is it a UNIXy OS running on top of Windows?
cygwin makes Win2k a great desktop OS, and make NT 4 livable. 😉
– chrish
I don’t think this has a run-time for Unix binaries, besides which x86 ones would you support. This runs shell scripts, Perl code, Python code, etc. These are what they (Microsoft) call applications.
I’d say that cygwin could probably accomplish most anything that SFU 3 could do; it also runs on WinXP. The opposite of this is Wine, as most of you know, lets you run Windows apps on Linux. I’d say that running windows apps on linux is probably a better option given Microsoft’s inherent nature to drop a product of close it off in anyway possible when they think it will tie users down to the Microsoft platform.
intigration tools are realy migration tools…..I am astonished that MS would misrepresent such a tool….how underhanded!!!
OK, cool, so you pay 100 buxors to get the same as Cygwin, which is free. Tax on ignorance?
I like the abbreviation “SFU”, it reminds me of “Shut the F* Up” :o)
Neat things which were not (to my knowledge) previously true when Interix was a separate product from a 3rd party.
* Microsoft is now a licensee of the FSF
* Microsoft now distributes software under the same GNU GPL that they describe as “viral” and “IP destroying”
* All significant OS vendors now sell GNU software (Unix vendors gave in years ago, then Apple, now Microsoft)
I wonder what Peter Tattam thinks of all this, after all he believes that the Free Software movement is a scam to make the developing world prop up big business in America. This MS product must really be causing his paranoia to go into overload!