“Ever tried this query in Google: “Linux-like environment for Windows” with inverted commas? If you have, it gives exactly 13700 results. Now try the same other way around. Google “Windows environment for Linux” but don’t use the quotes from previous query. It yields approximately 1150 results. This clearly shows that there are numerous applications that simulate a Linux environment on Windows and vice versa. But are all these applications really required?”
I was hoping for a more informative article. Alas, it was not to be.
An article entirely based on conjecture from search engine results?
The author doesnt seem to understand that Cygwin’s primary goal is not to provide a an easy to setup and use desktop such as KDE or GNOME on a windows install, rather to provide a linux layer and common linux tools to a windows box.
Nothing stopping anyone doing it though, and KDE and Gnome have been ported with various levels of success.
Actually it provides gnu tools, written fully independently of the Linux kernel.
Seriously, I can deal with people referring to Linux + other tools as Linux. But when you get to Cygwin, where Linux is not involved, and act like you know what you’re talking about…
And I’m not even sure Cygwin uses gnu tools and not bsd. It’s real purpose is to give an X11 and unix system for you to work on when you’re in Windows.
Cygwin uses GNU tools. Microsoft’s Services for UNIX uses mostly OpenBSD tools. SFU runs a heck of a lot better than Cygwin as well, but is positioned more as a server than a workstation solution.
Why is it that people don’t want to migrate to Linux?
Wow! This guy misses the point. The Cygwin environment helped me migrate to Linux. After 12+ years using Windows almost daily, it took a little doing to wean me away. Cygwin allowed me to explore the wonders of Linux without abandoning my productive platform.
Now that I’ve long ago made the switch, I continue to use Cygwin on a two Windows machines to give me the advantage of cron jobs and easy telnet access but while maintaining easy availability of drivers for an odd interface card.
As for Windows environment for linux, I didn’t see a mention of Wine: http://winehq.com
This is a Windows emulation layer for Linux that I depend on almost daily. It’s still under development and there are a lot of Windows applications that won’t install or don’t run right, but it’s perfect for the various command-line microcontroller compilers I use that aren’t available for Linux.
Wine isn’t an emulator.
When I am at work, and I don’t enjoy the feel and look of windows I am able to use a different shell to make my workday a little more productive.
Oops. I should have said “Windows compatibility layer.”
Actually, it is a reimplementation of the Win32 API.
heh, i had a discussion about that with someone that dabbled in the art of sound engineering (or whatever you want to call it).
his primary reason for not being interested in linux was that he claimed he could not use VST plugins.
i pointed him to wine and he started talking about it being no good as it was a emulator and therefor would result in a loss of performance.
could not shake that thought of him.
funny thing is that outside of some os calls (mostly to render the gui) the plugins will run native speed as they are x86 binarys.
people automaticly think wmware or game console emulators when they hear that word…
FFS, talk about phoning it in. Don’t RTFA, let me summarise for you:
1) There is a lot of material on the web about Linux environments for Windows, and slightly less for the converse.
2) Cygwin is nice but you have to recompile native apps for them to work under it. This apparently is why more people don’t use *nix.
3) Win4lin does the reverse, except you need a copy of Windows to make it work and it lacks multimedia hardware support, the second part supposedly only being an issue for home users.
4) Conclusion: repeat point 1, but flatly state that ’emulators’ [nice generalisation there] are not as good as the real thing. Unless they are.
Why would anyone even bother turning in / editing / putting out an article of so little depth or, for that matter, coherence? We learn sod-all about the true landscape of OS emulators/compatibility layers/porting frameworks save for a superficial glance at a seemingly random candidate from each OS. It doesn’t even answer its own question!
GRRRRR, I growl!
Where and what is this?????????
“Linux-Mandrake for Windows”
Baffled me when I saw it and now googling with not much success.
Who knows? But maybe a CoLinux[0], or QEMU[1] image or some such?
[0] http://www.colinux.org/
[1] http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
Edited 2006-03-27 13:30
Back around Mandrake 7-ish, they included a loopback mount version of their product that had a short stub loader that hid on the Doze desktop, and when invoked just mounted the image and ran from that. Didn’t go anywhere, so they dropped it about 7.2 iirc.
I just remembered. The item was called Lin4win.
This article is based on the premise that since there are more search results for the former, there are more apps to do so?
Wow, what a waste of time.
apparently, the best decision i made all day.
While Cygwin may occasionally be used to help introduce or convert someone to Linux, that isn’t its real purpose. It’s real function is to give people who must work on Windows machines access to some of the tools and power of a *nix command line. Yes, it’s “cryptic and complex.” It’s also useful and extremely versatile. Maybe once monad gets released, such tools won’t be necessary. Maybe. Big maybe.
that isn’t its real purpose.
You are right that Red Hat (AFAIK) never says Cygwin’s purpose is to introduce Windows users to Linux. But it served that purpose very efficiently for me, so it’s likely it did–and is doing–the same for others.
Since Red Hat is actually making a profit selling Linux, it stands to reason that this is at least a partial motive to continue making Cygwin the excellent tool that it is.
UWIN is a much better environment than Cygwin. Unlike Cygwin, which is based on GNU utilities, UWIN is built from the source code of Unix itself, and by AT&T themselves.
It’s better integrated with windows, it’s significantly more correct/compliant, has better performance and, unlike Cygwin, it is fully free/open source even for commercial use (Cygwin is dual licensed GPL/Commercial, UWIN is released under the Common Public License).
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
I looked thorugh the list of UWIN features and it seems a little sparse.
There is no mention of ruby, php, apache, gawk, cut, sed, find, vim, emacs, ash, bash, aspell, flex, ada, objective c, sleepycat, postgres, ssh, tcl, unison, or zsh.
How is this better?
Cygwin is great.
Let’s see:
sed, find, flex, ssh, awk, cut are all included. There are 270 utilities included according to the docs.
The rest, ruby, PHP, Apache, TCL, EMACS, postgresql etc. aren’t utilities I’d expect to have as part of the operating system but applications that run on top of it!
You don’t need them to include everything but the kitchen sink in the default install. You can run win32 native binaries under UWIN and UWIN automagically translates system calls. But if you want you can also compile your own binaries, or download third party builds (there are a few links in the UWIN page)
I’m personally running Python and Vim under UWIN right now. (btw, UWIN does include the one true vi)
ada, objective-c, etc. are part of gcc, you can run gcc (mingw) without problems under UWIN. As a matter of fact UWIN ships with a compiler wrapper around gcc, MS Visual C++, Borland, etc.
And you can actually redistribute such binaries without licensing issues. You cannot freely redistribute binaries built under Cygwin unless they are open source (or you pay for a commercial license).
How is it better, you ask? UWIN implements a much larger subset of the Unix API on top of Windows that Cygwin does. I personally ported the server of a well known commercial game from Unix to Windows in one day using UWIN. Cygwin couldn’t build it, as its implementation of System V IPC calls, among other things, is incomplete. By disabling many features from the server and rewriting parts of the engine we were able to build it (after a week of work) under Cygwin, but the performance of Cygwin’s networking code is very poor. UWIN runs the server with virtually no overhead over a Windows native app, with Cygwin there’s a performance hit of about 100%, and a much larger memory usage.
And UWIN is free, no strings attached, Cygwin is dual licensed: GPL/Commercial. If you want to use it as a portability layer for Unix/Windows in commercial apps you have to pay for a commercial license.
The rest, ruby, PHP, Apache, TCL, EMACS, postgresql etc. aren’t utilities I’d expect to have as part of the operating system but applications that run on top of it!
He was saying that CYGWIN has packages for those applications. Last time I checked, these environments are NOT operating systems, rather, operating environments that run on an operating system.
And you can actually redistribute such binaries without licensing issues. You cannot freely redistribute binaries built under Cygwin unless they are open source (or you pay for a commercial license).
This is true if you were to build something under UWIN. The license for the application you are creating the binary for doesn’t magically go away based on what it’s running on. Example, Apache doesn’t lose it’s Apache license when compiled and run on a *BSD. Mozilla and Firefox don’t become GPL because they are running on a system with the Linux kernel.
You are also misunderstanding the dual license. What that means is, you can take CYGWIN and make changes to it, but you have to release the code back to the community. If you want to incorporate the code into a closed-source commercial product, then you can pay a licensing fee and not have to release that code publicly. I will stress, that has NOTHING to do with the APPLICATIONS which are packaged with cygwin because those APPLICATIONS maintain THEIR OWN license. Cygwin’s license only pertains to the custom scripts and operating environment that allow those other apps to run.
Oh one final thing, you can include it in a commercial app without making any changes to it under the GPL. Hell, you can include it in a commercial app and make changes to it as long as you give the changes you made to the community if you are taking Cygwin’s GPL license. The only problem you run into is when you make changes and don’t return the changes to the community. That violates the GPL, but they give you the option of a Commercial license.
The license for the application you are creating the binary for doesn’t magically go away based on what it’s running on.
Actually it may magically go away. Case in point: Cygwin. Whenever you build an app under Cygwin it links to the cygwin1.dll library which is under the GPL (notice: not under the somewhat saner LGPL) and therefore the resulting binary is indeed GPL’ed.
The Cygwin folks make only one exception:
In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs whose sources are distributed under a license that complies with the Open Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll without libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll itself causing the resulting program to be covered by the GNU GPL.
http://cygwin.com/license.html
So, thanks to this special exception, other open source apps are not magically GPL’ed. But the fine folks at Cygwin do not extend this exception to any other program. If you are developing propietary software you must pay. They even put it in the FAQ:
…In particular, if you intend to port a proprietary (non-GPL’d) application using Cygwin, you will need the proprietary-use license for the Cygwin library. This is available for purchase…
http://cygwin.com/faq.html
I would like to point out that it is you who misunderstands the licensing terms of Cygwin:
…I will stress, that has NOTHING to do with the APPLICATIONS which are packaged with cygwin because those APPLICATIONS maintain THEIR OWN license. Cygwin’s license only pertains to the custom scripts and operating environment that allow those other apps to run.
This is completely, 100% wrong. The applications only maintain their license if they have an open source license to begin with. I believe the reason you don’t get it is because you don’t realise that whenever you build a binary under Cygwin you are linking against GPL’ed code. Once again: if your app is open source you’ve been granted a special exception to the GPL and you can keep your license, but if you are developing a closed source program you must pay (and it ain’t cheap). This has nothing to do with modifying Cygwin itself.
Example 1: If Rugmonster is a software developer and Rugmonster writes for a customer an app that requires Cygwin to run, then Rugmonster must pay for a commercial license to be able to deliver to his customer the app or convince his customer to release the app as open source.
Example 2: Rugmonster writes an app that requires Cygwin to run and redistributes it in any way (let’s say as shrink-wrapped software), then Rugmonster must pay for a commercial license or release the app as open source.
Hey, they don’t call it the General Public Virus for nothing…
* Knoppis is apparently the only Live CD.
* WINE does not exist.
* Emulators arent as good as the real thing.
* A lot of people shouldnt write articles.
* OSNews shouldnt link to those articles.
For those people who prefer gnu utilities and occasionally are forced to use windows workstations, you can still have your standard grep, find, cut, awk, etc on windows.
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
Also, please note that these are native ports and do not use Cygwin.
what’s an “inverted comma” … is that basically an apostrophe?
Read: quotation marks.
Yes, it’s pretty inane to call them “inverted commas.”
by its editor in chief Gundeep Hora. Site seems to be a spinoff from CoolTechZone. As soon as I see adlinks everywhere, I lose interest.
“Site seems to be a spinoff from CoolTechZone”
That’s a bad sign if there ever was one.
Only if you need to get some work done.
Mortice Kern you rock!
I’m not a windows user who is exploring *nix. I am a programmer who, after 2 years of working at a job where I could do all my development on a GNU/Linux desktop, switched to a job (reasons are complicated) where I am forced to use windows.
My job would be MUCH harder without cygwin. I can use bash, clean up data files with sed and awk, write makefiles to automate tasks, and compile all kinds of *nix tools that help me get things done. I’d be very, very, very frustrated working a shitty windows environment without my usual *nix tools. I use cygwin’s versions of tetex and gnuplot with a ruby program I wrote to automatically parse hundreds of log files on various servers to autogenerate graphs and then formatted pdf reports from those graphs. I just type:
make reports
and it gets done. Automating my tasks to the same degree in a pure windows environment would be hell. It would take me weeks to figure out how (maybe I’d have to get gnuplot and miktex and then use ant… it would be a total pain).
Part of that is because you are familiar with the unix tools and not the Windows tools.
You can do a lot of automation in Windows as well, just not through command-line as much. VBS or JS through WSH allows you to do a lot of automation if you need it. There are also other ways.
I also prefer command-line for some stuff, but MS is working on a command-line complement to existing tools at least (finally).
A complete crap article, that manages to be technically naive while stating and misrepresenting obvious facts, ingnoring others, and drawing preposterous, lazily concieved conclusions from them. I don’t really know if the naivete comes from pure inexperience or just lazyness, but who cares as long as the ad revenue keeps coming.
It would be cool if we could mod stories in addition to modding comments.
What a useless article. It doesnt even qualify as flamebait. Just useless…
Having started to use windows on a daily basis again(new job), if find the lack of one simple function insanely frustrating. Sure, lots of stuff could be nice, but this simple one impacts me with reduced productivity.
The X11 middle click copy/paste, I keep on marking text and middle clicking and nothing happens. Someone know a cure for this problem on XP, giving me proper copy/paste again? Something like Klipper, with history had been nice too. But that’s more a luxury than necessity.
Edited 2006-03-27 17:49
Why don’t you get used to proper copy/paste instead?
I agree that something similar to the X method would be nice in Windows. I have nothing to offer, though do have one complaint with the X model.
Say for example I find a URL that I want to paste into my address bar. I select the URL and then go to my address bar. Problem is, it’s occupied. If I select the text to paste over it (something I can easily do w/ the explicit clipboard model) I lose my previous data. So, I end up doing multiple steps (identify new URL, go clear the address bar, come back & get the URL, paste into the address bar). I find this to be inconvenient. Other than that I find the X model to be superior.
Why don’t you get used to proper copy/paste instead?
But that’s what I am, not that ineffective abomination with keyboard shortcuts. I have already preformed the copy when your fingers reaches the Ctrl and C keys. Such tings are usefull when you have both hands on your keyboard typing, less so when you don’t.
Say for example I find a URL that I want to paste into my address bar.
Well my browser of choice has a convenient button called ‘Clear Location Bar’ right next to it, making it dead easy and rather obvious to clear the address bar with only one additional click. Or you can use the even more efficient method given to you by X and any modern browser, simply select the URL and middle click. Then sit back and watch as your browser load the page. Even here the X model is superior:-)
Edited 2006-03-27 21:57
I did the first search, the whole first 10 results had 9 about Cygwin, 1 about Mono. 2 apps. Got halfway through the next 10 results, pretty much the same thing. To borrow a famous phrase.
Nothing to see here, move along.
and have you heard of a brand new technology called dual booting??
🙂
Doesn’t it just make the most sense to create a virtual machine using parallels workstation or one of the many vmware products?