services for unix is cool

Services for unix is the answer to computer science students everywhere's linux problems. I no longer have to load up linux in virtual pc. I can do my assignments using visual studio with the services for unix (interix) SDK which is just excellent

No more hacking files because an upgrade my the vpc video display go all funny.

edited to add: i don't have anything against linux per say. I just don't run it on desktop/laptop machines. Only servers.

    This reminds me of something About two years ago two friends were having an os fight. It was about the same time with this video. One argument of the linux guy was that you can't do things like fork in windows, so the windows guy went an installed the interix sdk and did a nice fork example .
    littleguru, there are some downsides of editing your files in from winscp (CRLF). Unless you transform them they will be all messed up, but I imagine you already know that

So this subsystem allows you to run any Linux/Unix program on Windows?

Isn't this a stab in the back for any *nix alternative operating systems?

Why hasn't Linux/Unix lost all credability if Windows can painlessly run all it's applications? They cannot do the same with all Windows programs.

How was this so easy for Microsoft to do this when the WINE project still doesn't support all Win32 apps after a decade of development?


Regards,
Vincent

No that’s not complete right its more like an small simulation engine. And WINE is the opposite way.

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

How was this so easy for Microsoft to do this when the WINE project still doesn't support all Win32 apps after a decade of development?

NT was designed from the ground up to support multiple subsystems, allowing it to present differing OS personalities to applications. And the Unix API is considerably smaller than Win32. If they'd included an X-Windows server in the SFU download, it would have been a killer.

Sadly with the integration of SFU into Server 2003 R2 and Vista Enterprise only, it looks unlikely to be widely used for running Unix desktop applications.

SFU (and Cygwin) provides header files and libraries that make it easier to re-compile or port *nix applications for use on Windows, but it does not make Windows binary compatible with *nix. Some BSD variants (FreeBSD at least), actually provide Linux binary compatibility which does provide the ability to run Linux binaries on FreeBSD. This is particularly useful for binary-only Linux apps like Mathematica.