Microsoft plans to broaden its stake on Linux and Unix systems this week by giving away a set of tools for migrating applications to Windows.
Microsoft takes on Unix with Free Tools
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
If now Windows can access Linux files system, can finally Linux hace complete access to NT partitions?
w/o legal obstacles?
well all the vanilla kernels i downloaded has had ntfs write support for a long time leagal problems i dont know buut it is included in the vanila sources.
Ok… that’s pretty sweet. They are giving Unix Services for Windows away.
I’ve used Unix Services for Windows to utilize scripts that ran on a Sun Workstation, but now need to run on a PC. The application saved me weeks of engineering a similar system on a PC. Definate “reuse!” I tried to use Cygwin, however the scripts had problems.
The article claims that the user can use the free software on any modern Windows OS. However, I don’t believe it runs on Windows XP Home edition.
Ok… I’m sorry, but that article left out an important fact. Microsoft is only offering the Beta version of the latest SFU (3.5). Besides, it does NOT run on XP Home edition. I believe the final 3.5 version will still cost $99.00.
NTFS write support for linux is still experimental, incomplete and quite useless atm. It’s a very complicated filesystem with a lot of different versions, so very hard to reverse engineer.
It’s useful though for migrating files from your NTFS partition to Linux. Read support is working fine. But that’s basically it.
” Ok… I’m sorry, but that article left out an important fact. Microsoft is only offering the Beta version of the latest SFU (3.5). Besides, it does NOT run on XP Home edition. I believe the final 3.5 version will still cost $99.00. ”
The final version will be free as well, according to Microsoft . The final edition will be available later but you best have a fast connection it weighs in at over 300 mb.
SFU/Interix 3.5 will be out of beta and released in another week or so. Microsoft is going to officially unveil it at this month’s LinuxWorld Expo.
The final version will be available as a free download or you can pay for shipping and have it mailed to you on CD.
True, SFU does not run on XP Home or any MS OS older than Windows 2000, but I don’t think anyone particulary cares about that.
” Ok… I’m sorry, but that article left out an important fact. Microsoft is only offering the Beta version of the latest SFU (3.5). Besides, it does NOT run on XP Home edition. I believe the final 3.5 version will still cost $99.00. ”
Most people who use this type of software run Windows XP Pro or Windows 2000 Professional.
“If now Windows can access Linux files system, can finally Linux hace complete access to NT partitions?
w/o legal obstacles? ”
How how does this change from before MS did this. Nothing has changed, it’s just cheaper to get them now. Not that it will change the number of people using them before. If they were something you needed you would have bout them anyways. If 99 bucks was to much for you then you really didn’t need them.
For what it’s worth, I have been running samba and an NFS server here in my shop for a couple years. I can honestly say that using SFU to access the nfs server instead of smb is WAY faster. It’s almost exactly twice as fast.
I think that it is great for linux users ! M$ shoot in the foot 🙂
We can use these free NIS, NFS and telnet clients in windows workstations to access a linux file/authentication server, without Samba, making NIS/NFS as the standard way of authentication/file serving on heterogeneous (Windows/Unix/Linux) networks 🙂
Why pay for Windows and use it as a Unix clone ? These tools only will help to people learn Unix and go to linux or *BSDs 🙂
And with these free tools M$ is making NIS/NFS as standards for Windows also… Cygwin always had shells, Unix utils, etc but no NIS or NFS clients.
From an article over at Microsoft-Watch:
“In December, the company held a Webcast where Program Manager Paul Cayley outlined some of the new features on tap for SFU 3.5. Among the enhancements:
– P-thread support. (P-threads are “Posix threads” that allow developers to write applications that support multiple tasks running concurrently within the same program.)
– Increased availability in the form of enhanced clustering support; mapping-server redundancy and increased component scalability. (The mapping server is designed to provide identity and security management. It matches Unix/Linux and Windows identities by user name.)
– Faster performance via better performance tuning, faster NFS client/server functionality and faster NIS server support. (In SFU, NIS server support allows users to set up a server as an NIS Master Server. It also consolidates Unix/Linux and Windows identity servers into a single user object under Active Directory.)
In the post-SFU 3.5 timeframe, it’s looking like Microsoft is going to build SFU right into the Windows Server platform.
Microsoft paid SCO last year for the right to license Unix. It wasn’t wholly apparent then, but Microsoft also paid SCO for the rights to incorporate SFU functionality directly into the Windows operating system.
Oldroyd refused to discuss features or distribution plans for future SFU releases. But he did say that Microsoft is “looking at ways of making the SFU and Windows (code) as seamless as possible in the future.””
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,4248,1434520,00.asp
Cygwin acesses the NT kernel via the Win32 Subsystem. SFU accesses it directly. SFU should be a lot faster.
U can write to NTFS!!! [safe]
The program is called Captive it uses some wine+reactos code
to emulate the parts of the windows kernel and to write to ntfs etc…