5 ms·

Incidentally, Microsoft abandoned MKS almost immediately. They bought Interix very soon after. Interix implemented UNIX system calls natively, so it always cam

by hapless 16y ago

Incidentally, Microsoft abandoned MKS almost immediately. They bought Interix very soon after. Interix implemented UNIX system calls natively, so it always came with traditional, useful shells. It's now bundled into Windows as a free product: Subsystem for Unix Application (SUA) or Services For UNIX (SFU). Last I checked, you could still buy MKS Toolkit from MKS, but I have no idea why you would want to.

mhansen 16y ago
How does it compare with cygwin? Can I fire up bash with SUA?
- thristian 16y ago
  It's been a while since I played with Services-For-Unix, but I recall it's better than Cygwin in that it's not a POSIX shim sitting on top of Win32, but actually sits beside Win32 on top of the NT kernel (which was always designed to support POSIX to some degree). It integrates the POSIX notion of user IDs with ActiveDirectory, etc. Where it all falls down, of course, is the usual bane of proprietary unicies - packaging. I think there's a 'freeware' site with tarballs of various useful tools you can download, but nothing approaching even Cygwin's small and limited packaging and upgrade system, let alone a real distro like Debian.
- hapless 16y ago
  It's much, much faster than Cygwin. Yes, it comes with most of the common shells out of the box: bash, ksh, etc. Even sets up start menu shortcuts for each, to encourage you to dip your toe in the water. Most of the user-space tools are based on OpenBSD userland rather than GNU utilities. Like Cygwin, it uses PE-COFF for binaries. It comes with both real GCC and a GCC-like wrapper for MSVC so that you can attempt to build software without modifying existing build files. Unfortunately, software compatibility isn't great. It's not that SUA/SFU is a bad implementation of UNIX, it's just that we live in a world where "everything is Linux." Building things on SUA/SFU really sucks, just like it sucks to build software on any other niche UNIX. (AIX, HP-UX, etc)

by hapless 16y ago

mhansen 16y ago

How does it compare with cygwin? Can I fire up bash with SUA?

thristian 16y ago
It's been a while since I played with Services-For-Unix, but I recall it's better than Cygwin in that it's not a POSIX shim sitting on top of Win32, but actually sits beside Win32 on top of the NT kernel (which was always designed to support POSIX to some degree). It integrates the POSIX notion of user IDs with ActiveDirectory, etc. Where it all falls down, of course, is the usual bane of proprietary unicies - packaging. I think there's a 'freeware' site with tarballs of various useful tools you can download, but nothing approaching even Cygwin's small and limited packaging and upgrade system, let alone a real distro like Debian.
hapless 16y ago
It's much, much faster than Cygwin. Yes, it comes with most of the common shells out of the box: bash, ksh, etc. Even sets up start menu shortcuts for each, to encourage you to dip your toe in the water. Most of the user-space tools are based on OpenBSD userland rather than GNU utilities. Like Cygwin, it uses PE-COFF for binaries. It comes with both real GCC and a GCC-like wrapper for MSVC so that you can attempt to build software without modifying existing build files. Unfortunately, software compatibility isn't great. It's not that SUA/SFU is a bad implementation of UNIX, it's just that we live in a world where "everything is Linux." Building things on SUA/SFU really sucks, just like it sucks to build software on any other niche UNIX. (AIX, HP-UX, etc)