Any experience with "Linux on Windows"?
Hi I have been running dual boot into Windows and Linus for decades, but had a major problem with the latest Windows 10 in dual booting with Ubuntu. Apparently, I have heard (can't locate the source) booting into Linux can no longer be done on the latest major upgrade to Windows 10. And this was my direct experience when a Windows 10 upgrade this past September all but bricked by computer, rendering 50% of my storage inaccessible. I tried to check the boot area, and fix the situation with a Windows disk then a Linux disk, which rendered both systems unbootable. The problem pretty much solved itself when I downgraded to Windows 7, not touching Linux. Whether it boots or not may be moot, since Windows has offered many Linux distros to run in a windowed environment on top of Windows 10, kind of like VLC. That is to say, you go to the Microsoft Store, download a Linux distro, and it will install as a Windows application under Windows 10. Sample link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/p/ubuntu-1804-lts/9n9tngvndl3q?activetab=piv... The link points to a copy of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I can see from the offerings, you can also install Debian, Suse, Fedora, and something called "Pengwin". Beware: some of these cost money, sometimes a fair chunk of it. It begs the question also as to how different are these distros from Cygwin? Sounds like these are just different attempts to duplicate what Cygwin is doing. BTW, Cygwin itself is not offered at the Microsoft store. Anyone have experiences with these weird versions of Linux running on Windows? I would like to hear about it. Any experience with how it would look with a dual monitor? Paul King
On 2020-01-14 07:53 PM, Paul King via talk wrote:
Hi
I have been running dual boot into Windows and Linus for decades, but had a major problem with the latest Windows 10 in dual booting with Ubuntu. Apparently, I have heard (can't locate the source) booting into Linux can no longer be done on the latest major upgrade to Windows 10. And this was my direct experience when a Windows 10 upgrade this past September all but bricked by computer, rendering 50% of my storage inaccessible. I tried to check the boot area, and fix the situation with a Windows disk then a Linux disk, which rendered both systems unbootable. The problem pretty much solved itself when I downgraded to Windows 7, not touching Linux.
I have no problem booting into openSUSE. However, there is an issue where W10 doesn't fully shut down the drive, so that it can boot faster. There's a setting that has to be changed, thought I don't recall the details at the moment. You should be able to Google for it though.
Whether it boots or not may be moot, since Windows has offered many Linux distros to run in a windowed environment on top of Windows 10, kind of like VLC. That is to say, you go to the Microsoft Store, download a Linux distro, and it will install as a Windows application under Windows 10. Sample link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/p/ubuntu-1804-lts/9n9tngvndl3q?activetab=piv...
The link points to a copy of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I can see from the offerings, you can also install Debian, Suse, Fedora, and something called "Pengwin". Beware: some of these cost money, sometimes a fair chunk of it.
It begs the question also as to how different are these distros from Cygwin? Sounds like these are just different attempts to duplicate what Cygwin is doing. BTW, Cygwin itself is not offered at the Microsoft store.
Anyone have experiences with these weird versions of Linux running on Windows? I would like to hear about it. Any experience with how it would look with a dual monitor?
Those W10 Linux installations are command line only, no desktop.
On 2020-01-14 07:53 PM, Paul King via talk wrote:
It begs the question also as to how different are these distros from Cygwin? Sounds like these are just different attempts to duplicate what Cygwin is doing. BTW, Cygwin itself is not offered at the Microsoft store.
I believe the current version is a full kernel install.
On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 09:19:47PM -0500, James Knott via talk wrote:
On 2020-01-14 07:53 PM, Paul King via talk wrote:
It begs the question also as to how different are these distros from Cygwin? Sounds like these are just different attempts to duplicate what Cygwin is doing. BTW, Cygwin itself is not offered at the Microsoft store.
I believe the current version is a full kernel install.
You get to choose. WsL1 is emulated kernel, WsL2 is actual kernel with some advantages and some disadvantages. -- Len Sorensen
On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 07:53:31PM -0500, Paul King via talk wrote:
Anyone have experiences with these weird versions of Linux running on Windows? I would like to hear about it. Any experience with how it would look with a dual monitor?
The real payoff is supposed to come Real Soon Now -- probably April:in WSL 2, the Linux kernel itself will receive system calls, running on a trimmed down version of the Hyper-V hypervisor, hosting files on a virtual ext4 disk. It will be sort of like running VirtualBox, but outside the Box. Right now there is a layer that translates kernel calls into Windows calls. It works surprisingly well. I have been running Debian-on-Windows (Win10 Pro) for a few months now. It doesn't run X11. There are complicated workarounds for this, but since I do most of my work at the console, it doesn't bother me. YMMV. Otherwise apt-get works as you'd expect, and so far everything runs very smoothly; WSL 1 uses an older, conservative version of Debian stable, and I haven't been tempted to run testing. (Well, okay, I've been tempted, but so far I haven't given in.) Have WSL take over the whole screen and it's very much like running Debian from the console normally. It's pretty easy to share files between WSL and Windows: the normal windows drive is automagically mounted at /mnt/c/. Then you just read/write to it. On the whole the integration is rather good. I haven't tried pushing the limits, mostly because I haven't needed to. Windows 10 Pro seems to be one of the occasional "solid" releases of Windows -- I haven't had it crash on me yet, or even misbehave, and things work more or less as you'd expect. However, I don't really know anything about Windows; this is the first time I've even tried it since Win 3.1, so I'm no expert. WSL 1 runs fine (in terminal/console mode) on a second monitor. It's easy and seamless to go from the Linux environment to Windows, and vice-versa. -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 02:19:51AM +0000, Peter King via talk wrote:
The real payoff is supposed to come Real Soon Now -- probably April:in WSL 2, the Linux kernel itself will receive system calls, running on a trimmed down version of the Hyper-V hypervisor, hosting files on a virtual ext4 disk. It will be sort of like running VirtualBox, but outside the Box.
Right now there is a layer that translates kernel calls into Windows calls. It works surprisingly well.
Right, I forgot about the terrible filesystem performance in WsL1 that WsL2 is supposed to fix.
I have been running Debian-on-Windows (Win10 Pro) for a few months now. It doesn't run X11. There are complicated workarounds for this, but since I do most of my work at the console, it doesn't bother me. YMMV. Otherwise apt-get works as you'd expect, and so far everything runs very smoothly; WSL 1 uses an older, conservative version of Debian stable, and I haven't been tempted to run testing. (Well, okay, I've been tempted, but so far I haven't given in.) Have WSL take over the whole screen and it's very much like running Debian from the console normally.
I have X410 app for windows 10, so it does run X apps.
It's pretty easy to share files between WSL and Windows: the normal windows drive is automagically mounted at /mnt/c/. Then you just read/write to it.
On the whole the integration is rather good. I haven't tried pushing the limits, mostly because I haven't needed to. Windows 10 Pro seems to be one of the occasional "solid" releases of Windows -- I haven't had it crash on me yet, or even misbehave, and things work more or less as you'd expect. However, I don't really know anything about Windows; this is the first time I've even tried it since Win 3.1, so I'm no expert.
WSL 1 runs fine (in terminal/console mode) on a second monitor. It's easy and seamless to go from the Linux environment to Windows, and vice-versa.
It certainly does work surprisingly well. Early on in the betas it was glitchy, but they fixed it up rather quickly. -- Len Sorensen
On Wed., Jan. 15, 2020, 10:15 Lennart Sorensen via talk, <talk@gtalug.org> wrote::
I have X410 app for windows 10, so it does run X apps.
There's also a free X server for Windows 10. It's not accelerated, but will do in a pinch. The WSL1 terminal is awful compared to what most distros provide. Copy and paste should be renamed 'hit or miss'. Cheers Stewart
On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 02:08:37PM -0500, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:
There's also a free X server for Windows 10. It's not accelerated, but will do in a pinch.
It also doesn't integrate with windows nearly as well as far as I could tell. X410 seemed worth the about $10 I paid for it.
The WSL1 terminal is awful compared to what most distros provide. Copy and paste should be renamed 'hit or miss'.
Using Windows Terminal works quite a bit better. -- Len Sorensen
Here are different ways (chronologically encounted) to get "Linux" environment in Windows: 1. Busybox for Windows - it's single binary, available in x32 and x64 version. - has "ncat", but no "ssh". 2. Cygwin - full Linux utilities (like sed, awk, bash, etc) compiled on Windows. - I don't use this anymore because I found better solutions (see below). 3. Git Bash for Windows - part of Git for Windows. - has "ssh", but no "ncat". 4. WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) - currently Ubuntu 18.04 from Windows Store. This my main terminal at work. - has full command-line Ubuntu environment, but slightly slimmed down to make sense for Windows OS. - can run Windows programs, if you're on Windows filesystem. Very convenient. - can run Linux program anywhere. 5. Hyper-V - unlike VirtualBox or VMware, you can't mount "shared directory". But, you can use scp or WinSCP to/from WSL. I don't use VirtualBox or VMware anymore. -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 07:53:31PM -0500, Paul King via talk wrote:
Hi
I have been running dual boot into Windows and Linus for decades, but had a major problem with the latest Windows 10 in dual booting with Ubuntu. Apparently, I have heard (can't locate the source) booting into Linux can no longer be done on the latest major upgrade to Windows 10. And this was my direct experience when a Windows 10 upgrade this past September all but bricked by computer, rendering 50% of my storage inaccessible. I tried to check the boot area, and fix the situation with a Windows disk then a Linux disk, which rendered both systems unbootable. The problem pretty much solved itself when I downgraded to Windows 7, not touching Linux.
Whether it boots or not may be moot, since Windows has offered many Linux distros to run in a windowed environment on top of Windows 10, kind of like VLC. That is to say, you go to the Microsoft Store, download a Linux distro, and it will install as a Windows application under Windows 10. Sample link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/p/ubuntu-1804-lts/9n9tngvndl3q?activetab=piv...
The link points to a copy of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I can see from the offerings, you can also install Debian, Suse, Fedora, and something called "Pengwin". Beware: some of these cost money, sometimes a fair chunk of it.
It begs the question also as to how different are these distros from Cygwin? Sounds like these are just different attempts to duplicate what Cygwin is doing. BTW, Cygwin itself is not offered at the Microsoft store.
Anyone have experiences with these weird versions of Linux running on Windows? I would like to hear about it. Any experience with how it would look with a dual monitor?
Paul King
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On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 07:53:31PM -0500, Paul King via talk wrote:
I have been running dual boot into Windows and Linus for decades, but had a major problem with the latest Windows 10 in dual booting with Ubuntu. Apparently, I have heard (can't locate the source) booting into Linux can no longer be done on the latest major upgrade to Windows 10. And this was my direct experience when a Windows 10 upgrade this past September all but bricked by computer, rendering 50% of my storage inaccessible. I tried to check the boot area, and fix the situation with a Windows disk then a Linux disk, which rendered both systems unbootable. The problem pretty much solved itself when I downgraded to Windows 7, not touching Linux.
Whether it boots or not may be moot, since Windows has offered many Linux distros to run in a windowed environment on top of Windows 10, kind of like VLC. That is to say, you go to the Microsoft Store, download a Linux distro, and it will install as a Windows application under Windows 10. Sample link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/p/ubuntu-1804-lts/9n9tngvndl3q?activetab=piv...
The link points to a copy of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I can see from the offerings, you can also install Debian, Suse, Fedora, and something called "Pengwin". Beware: some of these cost money, sometimes a fair chunk of it.
It begs the question also as to how different are these distros from Cygwin? Sounds like these are just different attempts to duplicate what Cygwin is doing. BTW, Cygwin itself is not offered at the Microsoft store.
Anyone have experiences with these weird versions of Linux running on Windows? I would like to hear about it. Any experience with how it would look with a dual monitor?
There is no issue with dual booting with Windows 10. In fact newer versions of Windows finally stopped overwriting the boot loader when you install them or upgrade. As for Linux running on Windows, it works very well, in fact so well my own laptop doesn't currently have a Linux install on it anymore because I never booted it. I can do everything I want using a Debian install running on Windows (I did buy the X410 X server app for Windows 10 which lets me run X applications in Linux which is useful). I have other machines that are dedicated Linux boxes in the house of course, but my laptop just is more useable with Windows 10 and Debian on top. My wife still dual boots Debian and Windows 10 on her laptop with no issues. Cygwin was always a bad joke in my view. It is nothing like what you get with the Windows subsystem for Linux. Cygwin tried to adapt posix compatible code into Windows calls. This instead implements a Linux kernel compatible system call layer so actual standard Linux binaries can run (there are a few exceptions due to a couple of still missing system calls, for example Qt needs a small patch to make it work). If you were to go with Windows subsystem for Linux 2 rather than the original one, then it actually runs a Linux kernel soemwhat like a virtual machine would and hence all the system calls work, and you can even do things like docker and such that require the proper kernel to work, and I believe it then has its own IP address and network stack which makes it a bit harder to setup (I have not tried it yet). Dual monitors are fine on Windows and you can place your windows however you want. I tend to use the new "Windows Terminal" to run the Linux instances with the keymappings changed to be similar to Konsole. With X410 each X app runs in a window as if it was a Windows app (you can choose to run an X desktop in a window if you really want to, but why would you?) so it integrates very well. Here is a screenshot where I have dual monitor, and Debian's gvim running as well as the Windows terminal: https://i.ibb.co/k8K1Df4/Debian-on-windows10-with-X411-and-gvim.png I do find it ammusing that these days it is Microsoft emulating Linux to run Linux binaries, rather than the days when Linux had to try to run other binaries. That happened with BSD too. Linux used to have support for running BSD binaries on x86, and these days it is the other way around instead. -- Len Sorensen
participants (6)
-
James Knott -
lsorense＠csclub.uwaterloo.ca -
Peter King -
sciguy＠vex.net -
Stewart Russell -
William Park