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Ubuntu on Windows

(blog.dustinkirkland.com)
2049 points bpierre | 1 comments | 30 Mar 16 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source
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zymhan ◴[30 Mar 16 17:09 UTC] No.11390932[source]▶
"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"."

I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on your own.

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UK-AL ◴[30 Mar 16 17:17 UTC] No.11391011[source]▶
Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem awhile ago, not sure what happened to it. The NT Kernel was designed to have different personalities like Win32, OS/2, POSIX, etc

It could be an updated version.

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1. vram22 ◴[30 Mar 16 17:59 UTC] No.11391465[source]▶
>Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem awhile ago, not sure what happened to it.

I was interested in that too, since I write Unix utilities and it is sometimes useful to have them work on Windows as well. I've done that (checked that it worked on Windows) with a few utilities in the past (written in C), that did not use any very Unix specific features that were not present on Windows. And remember reading around that time that Windows (I think it was from NT onwards) had a POSIX subsystem.

Then more recently, as in, a few months ago, I wanted to check that out again, and did. IIRC I read (maybe on a Wikipedia page) that the POSIX subsystem is not present in Windows any more.