Linux on Windows (Wine in reverse) | Hacker News Reader

Linux on Windows (Wine in reverse)

wezfurlong.org

98 pointsp4bl015 comments

That's kind of cool, if a bit perverse. A much more practical solution is a headless Virtual Box running Ubuntu, which you SSH into and can install anything via apt-get, etc... I recently started using this on OS X (via Vagrant) and it's super useful, for instance having access Linux LaTeX packages instead of having to deal with MacTex (MacTex is probably fine, but the 1.5 gb download was crawling for me, while `apt-get install texlive` took a few minutes) For Windows I would imagine it would be even more useful, since fewer Unix tools are immediately available. I think I would probably prefer this to Cygwin, which was always a bit weird for me.

This works great on Windows as well. I use Putty to SSH the Virtual Machine. I develop linux applications on my Windows machine seamlessly. It's really better than Cygwin, but I use Cygwin for some stuff like git. I also managed to install node.js with Cygwin, which is kind of cool!

"Cooperative Linux, abbreviated as coLinux, is software which allows Microsoft Windows and the Linux kernel to run simultaneously in parallel on the same machine."

Imho cooperative linux critical flaw is that it doesn't share filesystem with the host windows

I totally agree, it makes it more efficient, but not more practical than the usual virtual machine.

Colinux has the ability to mount your windows fs nowadays. I think the Linux module is called "cofs".

Check out Windows Services for Unix. You'd be surprised what works out of the box with it. It also enables case sensitive access to NTFS volumes, which can be really useful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

Reminds me of lxrun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lxrun http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~steven/lxrun/lxrun-FAQ.html#Q0....

lxrun also trapped syscalls, and supported running Linux binaries on Solaris, SCO UnixWare, and SCO OpenServer.

I used it in the late 90s as a quick hack to run linux binaries that were a huge headache to build on weird systems like OpenServer.

See also (2001): "LINE Is Not an Emulator. LINE executes unmodified Linux applications on Windows by intercepting Linux system calls."

http://sourceforge.net/projects/line/

january 2004

Updated on 22 May 2011 (the source is now available at bitbucket).

https://bitbucket.org/wez/pengwin/src

Awesome. There's a lot I'd like to do without having to incur the overhead of a Virtual Machine

Like use the Linux BlueZ stack. But that still sounds remote at this stage.

I always thought mist Linux packages have some sort of Windows version.

This focuses on int 0x80, which is the old method; it's been replaced by the sysenter opcode, which is faster on newer chips. (This has been the case since Linux 2.5, and Pentium II+ processors; it was apparently first noticed on the Pentium IV.) Would this basic method work with sysenter?

http://articles.manugarg.com/systemcallinlinux2_6.html

http://kerneltrap.org/node/531 (From 2002)

http://lwn.net/Articles/18412/ (Yep, late 2002)

I am surprised no one has mentioned Cygwin yet. http://www.cygwin.com

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