On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 11:48:26PM +0100, Saqib Shaikh wrote: > Hi Jakob > > Thanks for your reply. Is there any information about the original aims of > this project, and how far people got? I may, if the amount of work required
Dig here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-win32/ > was reasonable, be interested in pushing this project forward - at first > look it doesn't seem too hard, but I may well be mistaken. The approach taken was to port many of the underpinning unix and debian utilities to windows, via cygwins libc. (So cygwin was to be forked.) This is pretty much like one of the debian ports to BSD. One of these used not only a BSD kernel instead of linux, but also the BSD libc. This debian-win32 version would be much the same. All programs would have to be recompiled for this libc. At least that is how I understood how the port was going to be done. Since then, I have come to believe another approach altogether would be best. Not that the described approach would not work, but it is a lot of work, and nobody seems to have that kind of time. What I believie would be best is this! http://LINE.sourceforge.net/ This excellent program emulates the Linux kernel. So, to port Debian to Windows, very little has to be done. The standard Debian i386 could be run under Windows, and Debian would think it runs on Linux, when in fact it would be running on an emulation of Linux. In fact the author already has run complex Linux applications running: http://LINE.sourceforge.net/shots.php So what has to be done is getting the Debian installer to run under LINE. Or at provide some sort of already-installed-minimal Debian configure for LINE. That would take of all console based applications. To run graphical apps, just install an X-server on Windows. You could even use Cygwins X-server, for extra confusion. :-) LINE is really awesome. I can not believe it so unknown as it is. If you look at https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=3328&group_id=22093 You will see that the author has brilliant ideas. NSO for example. > Presumably you have an interest in using Unix-like tools under Win32 > yourself - do you currently use Cygwin? Have you found a better way of > managing packages other than using Cygwin's Setup program? Yes I use Cygwin, no have not found any other way. -- regards, Jakob Eriksson The wages of sin is debugging. -- Ron Jeffries (XP project coach)
