A group of Windows programmers is working on porting Gentoo’s Portage over to Windows SFU. If you don’t know already, Windows Services for UNIX is a full POSIX subsystem for Windows, enabling it to compile and run almost any software that will compile on BSD, Solaris, HP/UX, and Linux. Details to “emerge” soon.
Gentoo’s Portage to be ported to Windows Services for UNIX
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I’d have expected them to port OpenBSD’s ports to WSFU when one considers that SFU take OpenBSD code heavily.
Microsoft would not risk shipping a GPL program, this article must be talking about a third party group of developers.
On a related note why post an article with no URLs to back it up?
This sounds great, can’t wait till this happens.
I use Gentoo, on multiple computers, and I must say, that would be insanely awesome. They’d have at least one person who’d use it.
embracing & extending
I found this site on google but it has to be a joke (check the date it was last updated).
http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/
Yes, it was gentoo’s april 1st joke.
This could be a good thing, but I wonder how this will affect the open source community. If you can run all of your favorite linux/unix software on windows will that pull users away from running a true linux environment? I guess we will see.
Exactly. It was Gentoo’s April Fool’s joke. I’m surprised people haven’t fallen for it sooner…
After using Xandros for several years version 1.0-3.0 and making a successful changover from Microsoft to Linux, many things have changed including my way of looking at my operating system.
Linux has shown me that there is life beyond Microsoft and security beyond IE. I realize more than ever that I don’t use just one application so why would I use just one operating system? After using Win4lin on my Xandros installation, I installed Windows98SE to be compatible with the online college I am attending. I use the security of Linux as the basis of a rock solid computer system to do everything except what has to be done in Windows. I don’t use one application to do everything and I see no reason not to use Windows for the things it does the best such as capturing video from my digital camcorder to DVD etc. There are also some Insurance rating software that is only compatable with Windows. For everything else I use Xandros.
Linux will never put Windows out of business but Microsoft is going to have to get used to sharing the desktop/server market with Linux. Its time has come.
penguin7009
“Microsoft would not risk shipping a GPL program”
if i remember correctly, you’ll find that they do ship GPL programs with SFU.
Why should they take OpenBSD ports while there’s a lot more software in FreeBSD ports?
Depending on which version of Windows SFU you are using, some of it was written by Interop (Interix OpenNT) and parts of it came from Mortice Kern Systems (MKS Toolkit). I have no idea how much OSS code is in either product, but if you want to find out, take it up with them.
*sigh*
the idea started from the joke but is no joke.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-319691.html
there you get a link dont know if they have made any progress
but i belive that this article is reffering to this post
It was mentioned back on Undeadly a while ago: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20030927090008
I hope they don’t plan on using the same mirrors, that would be fairly mean.
.. it will bring more people to linux and not the other way around, since ppl might think if portage is on win sfu… then theres no point to gentoo.. but i would never think that.. since gentoo rocks
I wonder if X11 apps would work? Would it use Cygwin’s X server?
Anyways, this would be totally awesome (and so would GeNToo, regardless of it being a joke or not). I’ve always wanted to somehow run KDE/GNOME in a root X window as my primary desktop and disable Windows Explorer. This may make that a bit easier to do for me!
-Eric
NetBSD’s pkgsrc has been there for some time now. Have not tried it yet, though, since I don’t do windows any more. I find it booring.
Porting the build framework (gentoo or pkgsrc) is probably the easiest part. Making sure that non-trivial programs can be built is harder.
An april’s fools joke, nothing more to say…
Which ones, considering SFU isn’t written by Microsoft to start with.
no it is not sure it’s not as grand as the aprils fools yet but i pasted the link of one who started the project.
It wasn’t originally written by Microsoft, but Microsoft bought and does develop it now.
Eric, you can already run KDE/GNOME in a root X window as your primary desktop and disable Windows Explorer. Don’t know why you would want to do that but it works in the same way as using litestep instead of Windows Explorer
“This could be a good thing, but I wonder how this will affect the open source community. If you can run all of your favorite linux/unix software on windows will that pull users away from running a true linux environment? I guess we will see.”
Personally, I would far, far rather have a capability to run all of my required-to-use Windows software on Linux. A fully-capable Wine would perhaps be able to achieve this – I don’t really want VMWare or Win4Lin as both of those involve running Windows itself.
If I had a correct and fully-functional way to run a few select Windows binaries on a Linux system (especially on a SELinux system), that way I could have all required functionality and retain a truly secure system.
However, I don’t expect that many people will be able to see any advantage of what I would prefer over what is promised by the lead article.
I would really expect to be drowned out by the crowd here on this topic.
nice, gentoo ownz
I wonder what’s going on with Wine lately? I haven’t heard much about it, other than the constant search for alternatives to it (such as the very specific Crossover Office).
And regardless, THIS does not seem to be a joke.
It was INSPIRED by the joke.
Whether or not it gets anywhere is anybody’s guess.
Wine is still far from complete. AFAIK it is still only marginally functional. It is not in any sense a viable solution for what I want to do. What I would like is to be able to run the odd Windows program under Linux. I have to do this because many software vendors who do have useful products do not produce a Linux version, and indeed one vendor in particular (whose applications software I am forced to use in a work context) shows every sign of NEVER porting any of its applications to Linux.
This I find to be an exceedingly vexing situation. I am annoyed that Microsoft conspires to limit my choices in this manner.
The topic of this thread is a way to run some Linux applications under Windows. I agree that this is not a joke of any kind, and perhaps even it is a good thing – but it is not exactly what I would prefer to do.
I think they are currently beginning to realise why software patents can be a bad thing, given that Borland has them worried of potential infringement issues.
Then we can slow poor Windows like portage slows down Linux. They should rewrite their crappy slow Python code before attempting to bloat other platforms with it. Can’t even do a ’emerge -s’ without being root…
I cant wait to get my hands on this. can u think of a NT machine running all the linux appz?
nice
“Why should they take OpenBSD ports while there’s a lot more software in FreeBSD ports?”
Why bother with either when NetBSD’s PKGSRC runs won Windows SFU already?
Just a thought…
http://www.pkgsrc.org/
thats not true so you dont like portage thats your problem.
but you do not need to misinform people ’emerge -s’ works
well without being root.
maby it did not along time ago wich still dosent make your statment true to day
Using emerge requires being in the portage group, but does not require being root (except for installs)
Additionally Portage is generally not slow due to Python but rather due to not really having a centralized db like RPM; fs accesses are where you’re taking a big performance hit.
Current CVS HEAD Portage is significantly faster FWIW
If popular applications (eg. software from large/mid/small open source projects) doesn’t run on windows, customer must buy and install Un*x OS alternatives. This is bad for M$. That platform wins in this “competition”, which is able the run the software thats important for the customer. So i think that it’s not about “.. Microsoft realise why software patents can be a bad thing..” or something like that. It’s more than about that M$ realizes how the “open source power” can be translated to fits m$ needs (or something like that).
—
Anyway, has anyone tried running samba server on SFU? Is it faster than related m$ things ?
D
I keep an eye on Wine development, and use it when needed. Wine currently supports many apps, the older the better actually. The only areas where wine needs work(and is getting it) is in the 3d graphics api’s and DCOM(used extensivly in the installshield code).
You can run IE5 on it nativly for gods sake!
Try your app, it might work, and filing bug reports/patches is a good thing. These people want it to work, if you direct them to a problem, they will help.
As for the topic here, I use Cygwin sometimes on windows, and find it relativly usefull, but running as an actual layer of the OS would probably make it even better…
This is all FUD, and useless.
Who wants to run anything under Windows now, anyway?
Perhaps it marginally covers the 1% special cases, but what about the rest?
I mean: Wine, Mono, etc, (even cygwin) are not really viable solutions in Windows. There is no viable solution in Windows yet, and I doubt there ever will, given their previous history.
Better to run the legacy stuff in VMWare, and gradually drop Windows as more interoperable applications become available.
Who wants to run business applications on version 0.5beta of something, that will never get to 1.0 due to lack of information from Microsoft?
“if i remember correctly, you’ll find that they do ship GPL programs with SFU.”
Yes, they do, and that is why they couldn’t ship SFU with Windows 2000/XP/2003 and instead offer it as a free download. However, MS has announced that they will include SFU with Longhorn, which in turn implies that they’re going to find non-GPL replacements for the GPL’ed apps (GCC, bash, et al).
Are you aware of the fact that SFU wasn’t exactly a free download some little time ago?
> However, MS has announced that they will include SFU with Longhorn
where do you have this info from?
And is it reliable?
http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=longhorn+sfu&btnG=G…
SFU was really handy back when. It’s NFS server really worked, though administering it was less than exciting. It seemed plagued with script problems.
It apparently has become a sort of MKS toolkit (http://www.mkssoftware.com/) thing?
Portage and pkgsrc are both based on FreeBSD’s ports collection. pkgsrc was already “ported” to Windows SFU, so..in essence the idea is not anything new.
Portage and pkgsrc are both based on FreeBSD’s ports collection. pkgsrc was already “ported” to Windows SFU, so..in essence the idea is not anything new.
> “if i remember correctly, you’ll find that they do ship GPL programs with SFU.”
> Yes, they do, and that is why they couldn’t ship SFU with Windows 2000/XP/2003 and instead offer it as a free download
GPL allows anybody to distribute GPL’d softwares, the only restriction is that you have to make the source and your modifications available (mac OS X ships with bash, for example). They could have shipped SFU with previous versions of their OS.
The MirPorts Framework, an improved derivate of the OpenBSD
ports tree, is already there. There’s an ftp(1) replacement
for fetching distfiles missing, and I have not yet decided
on how to exactly handle it (probably a libbsd). Other than
that, we obviously lack human ressources, but in contrast to
the Gentoo people, this is not an april joke.
And it was done without looking at pkgsrc (but we’ll look
there at least for the openssh port
even.
…..
}|{geM e6uJlgoB!
this woulda beena lot cooler for MinGW.. SFU is a hog and its cmopatibility reminds me of MAc OS X Circa 1998 (RHapsody era)..
best bet? delete windows entirely..
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