Afternoon all, Windows 2003 Server R2 is to ship shortly with a POSIX subsystem (Interix 5.2 of Services for Unix fame) which "includes more than 300 UNIX utilities and tools that behave as they would on UNIX systems, plus a software development kit (SDK) that supports more than 1,900 UNIX APIs and migration tools, including make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.". Apparently future versions of Windows (eg Vista) will follow suit.
With a tweak of config.guess I have had no problems compiling bash-3.0, wget, etc. on Windows 2003 and am now interested in tacking some more interesting packages, like dpkg and apt, with a view to getting a full port of Debian running on it. The problem is that I have limited time and porting experience, and the fact that this was previously attempted under Cygwin is disconcerting; the debian-win32 mailing list has been around for years and yet there there has only been one non-spam post in the last 18 months according to the archives. According to http://www.interix.com many interesting packages have already been ported over and are currently available for download for $30 as 'Interop Toolworks 2.2' (http://www.interix.com/InteropToolworks.htm). Presumably source is provided/available - I have posted the question in their Unix Tools forum as I figure this would be a good starting point. While there's no X server included, the X libraries are and the new release opens up the Win32 API which should pave the way for someone to build one. In the mean time Starnet Software do ship a free 'LX' version which will accept localhost connections only (http://www.starnet.com/xwin32LX/get_xwin32LX.htm). At this stage I'm looking for feedback about the viability of such a project, information about why the last one appears to have failed and any suggestions about what the procedure would be (eg build dpkg, then debootstrap etc.), how best to ensure its success, and so on. I would like to think it will be possible to bootstrap a base Debian installation (Debian GNU/Interix?) from an installer executable, or possibly even deliver it via ActiveX, eventually getting to the point where one can log into Windows and get a full Debian desktop complete with your favourite window manager. For the time being I'll be happy with bash, OpenSSH, etc. but it's interesting to consider what is possible... SFU/SUA was meant as a migration path *to* Windows, but there's nothing stopping it from being a two way street. Sam
