Show HN: LoWe – Extending the functionality of Ubuntu running on Windows 10 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LoWe – Extending the functionality of Ubuntu running on Windows 10

github.com

34 pointskpocza7 comments

> LoWe creates the missing device files (as regular files) under /dev to let them to be opened by the program and have a file descriptor. Later on it intercepts Linux kernel system calls (syscalls) in user mode via ptrace (like strace). When LoWe thinks that she is responsible to handle given syscalls (ioctl, read, write, mmap, etc.) of particular devices identified by file descriptors then it provides her own responses to the syscalls instead of going down to the Windows kernel that has no support for those functions.

Simple and neat idea.

Thank you.

I know that there is room for improvement.

What do you think, where should I improve LoWe first? Should I add more apps, more devices, or make it easier to use?

Question for the author: in terms of running X apps, what's the advantage of this over using a third-party x server, like VcXSrv?

Using VcXSrv and just two tweaks (setting DISPLAY to :0 and setting dbus to not use UNIX sockets), I've gotten gnome-terminal, gvim, and Plank dock working perfectly. Firefox, Nautilus file explorer, and various Gnome programs seem to work fine too.

Most probably to employ a third-party X server is more robust at the moment.

However in this case we can achieve the same effect with the Ubuntu bits of the X server. It's true that here we require other tweaks but this is a bigger step towards letting Ubuntu on Windows on its own to run X apps.

LoWe provides a generic approach and idea that can be applied in a specific way to other functionalities. Eg. it's possible to play music (PCM) by "emulating" some ALSA devices.

This is cool, though I use WSL and haven't really run into a situation where I actually want to run any GUI software from WSL.

I'm curious if there was an actual need that drove this.

Originally there was no actual need, I was just curious about the technology, the limits and I wanted to push these limitations.

But: Later I realized that there is a need for this. With apt, it's much easier to install and update (GUI) apps than with the Windows installer, so the need has grown from nothing to a real-world requirement. Moreover it happened several times that I was looking for some software and there were many alternatives for Linux but nothing valuable for Windows. LoWe will help in these situations, as well.

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