Friday, September 12, 2008

Microsoft Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications

Though MS have similar things since 2000's, but I just found about it today.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771470.aspx
Wikipedia is quite more informative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Services_for_UNIX

For Linux guys, that means MS supports CC and X11, GDB, ls, kill, grep, awk, and the list goes on and on. As I understood from wikipedia, it comes with more than 350 such utilities.

CC is a wrapper around VC++. X11 doesn't come with a working X server so you'd use an open one like Cygwin/X.

To avoid confusing the reader, it's originally an implementation of the POSIX specifications (Portable Operating System Interface, an IEEE standard). I don't know why they took it from a defensive point of view and claimed it is only there to support UNIX apps..

UNIX apps can be source-ported, but not binary-ported. That means you have to recompile them on Windows to work there.

There were such a POSIX-compatibility implementation on Windows that I've heard of and used extensively (like Cygwin), but this is the first time for me to know that MS have "paid" developers to work on that :D :D

Wikipedia says that for Vista it only comes with Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

4 comments:

ضياء الدين said...

I've installed Cygwin and it works fine. I think Microsoft did that to prove it helps others and to challenge other emulators.

Mohammad Alaggan said...

Btw, cygwin was not implemented by microsoft and not related to microsoft at all.

ضياء الدين said...

I know sure :D
It's an open source UNIX emulator
I just said I've installed it.
But I didn't try MS-SUA (Subsystem for UNIX-based Application) yet and I just guess why Microsoft did that.

Thanks :)
I'm Deyaa Eldeen A. Almahallawi
2nd year FCI-H and in my way to 3rd year
I've attended a SE course under your supervision :)

Mohammad Alaggan said...

they did it to support unix applications in case companies needed to use unix applications on an MS server :)
so that they can do it within windows and need not shift to linux to use it.

etsharafna ya ostaz Deyaa :)
you are welcome if u want to discuss any topic anytime :) it would be my pleasure :)