- Reaction score
- 1,678
Since the early 1990s, when Windows became much more popular in the enterprise, people have been trying to put Unix and Linux into places where it doesn’t want to be, using toolkits that implement just enough of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) standard to feel like Unix.
The reasons are pretty simple: a lot of open source tools, especially development tools, are primarily targeted to Unix/Linux platforms. Although the most important ones have been ported to Windows, they are designed to work best when they have access to a Unix/Linux shell scripting environment and the many utilities that come with those platforms.
Today, there are many options availability for getting Unix or Linux functionality on Windows, and the most recent one, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), provides a Linux environment that is deeply integrated with Windows. But before I get into that, I’ll look at the some of the other options.
In the early 1990s, you could get a pretty good Unix shell, compiler, and text utilities on DOS using DJGPP. It was also around this time that you could simply install Linux on a computer if you wanted a pure Unix-like environment. Linux had none of the limitations that a Unix-like subsystem had, but it also meant that you had to convert in total to Linux.
So, if you wanted—or needed—to run a Unix-like environment alongside a Microsoft operating system, you needed a subsystem like DJGPP. And in order to comply with US Federal Information Processing Standards and be considered for defense-related projects, Microsoft needed one, too.
Read more here. (O'Reilly)
The reasons are pretty simple: a lot of open source tools, especially development tools, are primarily targeted to Unix/Linux platforms. Although the most important ones have been ported to Windows, they are designed to work best when they have access to a Unix/Linux shell scripting environment and the many utilities that come with those platforms.
Today, there are many options availability for getting Unix or Linux functionality on Windows, and the most recent one, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), provides a Linux environment that is deeply integrated with Windows. But before I get into that, I’ll look at the some of the other options.
In the early 1990s, you could get a pretty good Unix shell, compiler, and text utilities on DOS using DJGPP. It was also around this time that you could simply install Linux on a computer if you wanted a pure Unix-like environment. Linux had none of the limitations that a Unix-like subsystem had, but it also meant that you had to convert in total to Linux.
So, if you wanted—or needed—to run a Unix-like environment alongside a Microsoft operating system, you needed a subsystem like DJGPP. And in order to comply with US Federal Information Processing Standards and be considered for defense-related projects, Microsoft needed one, too.
Read more here. (O'Reilly)
