Windows Subsystem for Linux is coming to Windows Server (Bash joins CMD and PowerShell)

The Register ^ | Aug 9, 2017 | Simon Sharwood

[dayglored]

Microsoft has announced that Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is coming to Windows Server.

Microsoft's adding it to Windows Server for the same reasons it added it to Windows: it wants developers to have whatever tools they prefer at their disposal.

Sysadmins are also on Redmond's mind, it says. “If you’re a server engineer that needs to run node.js, Ruby, Python, Perl, Bash scripts or other tools that expect Linux behaviors, environment or filesystem-layout, the ability to install and run Linux with WSL expands the tools at your disposal on Windows Server.”

Redmond snuck WSL into Windows Server Insider Build 16237 without including it in the announcement. It's now issued instructions on how to install it. If you'd rather not click, it's just a single line of PowerShell fun if you're logged in with administrator rights:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Microsoft warns: “You cannot currently use WSL to run persistent Linux services, daemons, jobs, etc as background tasks.”

Note that word “currently.” It could be loose language or it could be a clue to future developments. ®

[dayglored]

Of course, this is about A LOT more than Bash. We're talking an environment that looks and acts like a Linux environment.

Steve "Linux is a Cancer"* Ballmer must be flipping out. Of course he's rich enough he doesn't actually give a cr@p now.

Anyway, this is a Big Deal. Especially for those of us SysAdmins who daily work with both Windows Server and Linux server systems interoperatively.

 

* Yeah, I know, he said Open Source was a cancer, as he tried to destroy Linux. Whatever. :-)

[dayglored]

Linux and Windows Server, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G ... PING!

You can find all the Windows Ping list threads with FR search: just search on keyword "windowspinglist".

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

Eventually Windows will just be a presentation layer for Linux. Been saying it for years.

[PreciousLiberty]

Interesting times. It’s hard to see how running free Linux on top of an expensive, proprietary OS beats simply running free Linux... What it does do is give Linux yet more credibility as a server OS, not that it really needed it.

Microsoft is in trouble in the server room. Linux has tremendous momentum, very few startups are using Windows at this point. So far Windows is clinging to the Outlook/Office niche, we’ll see how that does going forward...

I hope the BSDs start to gain some traction against Linux, it’s bad to have just a couple of OS options from a security standpoint.

[IndispensableDestiny]

NT 4 and I think Win 2K had “Unix subsystem for Windows.” They needed it for POSIX compliance.

[zeugma]

Having a Bash subsystem isn't really enough to do real work.You need the rest of the subsystems that go along with it, like sed, awk, grep, perl, cut, tail and the like, not to mention ssh. It's the Gnu toolbox that gives the command like real power to manipulate things. I've got some scripts that run through crontab on the systems that I support that do some really amazing things for me. Sure would be nice to have a 'write once, use anywhere' architecture for such things.

It's really too bad that exchange has such a huge lock on the messaging market. Without MS-Exchange and MS-Office, there would be no place for Microsoft.

[miliantnutcase]

Exactly. Finding a guy who knows Linux and powershell is exceedingly rare.

[dayglored]

> Having a Bash subsystem isn't really enough to do real work.You need the rest of the subsystems that go along with it, like sed, awk, grep, perl, cut, tail and the like, not to mention ssh. It's the Gnu toolbox that gives the command like real power to manipulate things

If the Server WSL is like the one for client Windows, you can run a distro (e.g. Ubuntu) in it, including the normal GNU and other distro-supplied programs and languages. Just not the Linux kernel or driver/service-level stuff. You'll still be running the NT kernel. But all the GNU utilities and whatnot will see a Linux-like environment.

I picture it sort of like a chroot'ed environment. I regularly take older mission-critical machines that have to stay with old-version tool-chains (GCC, make, etc.) for compatibility reasons, and place them under a modern Linux chroot host so that they have the modern kernel, but the chroot'ed /bin, /lib, /usr, /etc, etc. are all the old stuff. Works like a champ.

I'm not saying that's exactly what Microsoft is doing here, but it's sort of how I interpret what I've read so far about their intention for "running Linux under Windows". They really mean "running GNU tools and open source applications under Windows". And that specifically includes all the tools like sed, awk, grep, and so forth.

It's gonna play hell with Cygwin's users (which includes my company big-time). If Microsoft does this right, there will be no reason to deal with Cygwin or similar subsystems. But converting will take time. And who knows if Microsoft will do it right enough.

Whether you'll get crontabs and so forth any time soon is a different question entirely.

[dayglored]

> NT 4 and I think Win 2K had “Unix subsystem for Windows.” They needed it for POSIX compliance.

Yeah, that's right. The Windows Services for Unix was whipped up back around 2000 so they could claim POSIX. But Microsoft never treated it seriously, it was never very useful, and they nearly deprecated it from time to time.

This time they're running scared and they know that to survive they have to attract Linux users and developers, which is a very different, and much more powerful, motivation.

[minnesota_bound]

sed, awk, grep, perl, cut, tail and the like, not to mention ssh.

Sounds like you have a frog in your throat.
Is ‘frog’ a programming language?

[zeugma]

sed, awk, grep, perl, cut, tail and the like, not to mention ssh.

Is ‘frog’ a programming language?

Ya. We croak the code out, and it can do amazing things.

What's funny is that I have scripts that pretty much use all of the above commands in a single line.

Here's an actual functional line from one of my scripts. It is actually doing a crapload of work.
sed 's/#/ /g' $FILE | awk '{print $4}' | sort | uniq -ic | sort -nr | sed 's/://g' > $FILE.client

...Which brings to mind this particular gem... Is Unix a Hoax?

From the article...

"In 1969, AT&&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

    for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

[BlueLancer]

"Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy."

I read "Bored of the Rings" back when it first came out in 1969. It's always worth a re-reading ... excellent parody and laugh-out-loud funny.

[minnesota_bound]

I can do HTML and CSS for making a webpage but that is it.
All you posted was greek even to the Greeks : )

[usconservative]

Exactly. Finding a guy who knows Linux and powershell is exceedingly rare.

Really? I've been doing it for YEARS already. I don't think I'm rare by any stretch of the imagination in that regard. I think you just don't know the right people.

[usconservative]

This time they're running scared and they know that to survive they have to attract Linux users and developers, which is a very different, and much more powerful, motivation.

Considering the overwhelming majority of mainstream business software runs on Windows PC's and Windows Server environments, I'm not so sure Microsoft is running scared.

What they ARE doing is giving developers a choice in the environment they want to develop without consideration to the underlying OS. Personally I think it's a good thing. It's going to expand capabilities beyond the individual OS platforms themselves.

[dayglored]

> Considering the overwhelming majority of mainstream business software runs on Windows PC's and Windows Server environments, I'm not so sure Microsoft is running scared.

Well, yeah, I overstated it a bit. But they're nowhere as confident in their ability to execute as they once were, and their recent forays into mobile products and cloud offerings haven't been stellar successes. Azure is credible but nothing like Amazon, etc. And the mobile side is dead -- Ballmer's famous laughter at the iPhone is pretty hollow these days.

They rested on their laurels, relying on their monopoly status, for long enough that their competition had time to grow from negligible to credible to substantial. MS still has the majority, but it's the trend that they are rightly worried about.

[usconservative]

Azure is credible but nothing like Amazon, etc.

All your other points are valid, except the above. Yes, Ballmer was an idiot for laughing at the iPhone, MS' forays into Mobile have been horrible but the Surface is having big success in the Enterprise space. Three years ago our Senior Exec's all wanted iPads/iPad Pro's. Now? The want the latest Surface devices.

And about Azure: it contributes more to Microsoft's bottom line than any other line of business Microsoft has and they're growing as fast/faster than Amazon. Azure is the only real competition to AWS at this point.