Assumption: Virtual machines are a great idea. But, they are bulky, slow, take of a ton of ram, disk space, and generally suck to manage. It's one thing to get 'your' virtual machine among others, but it is something else entirely to manage many or try and cram many onto a laptop
So, what to do? How do you get the best of both worlds:? The answer is Vista with Subsystem for Unix Applications.
Big Bummer: You *MUST* have Vista Enterprise or Ultimate. Vista Business will not let you play with this.
Assuming you've upgraded to Ultimate (might as well get the cool media center stuff, dreamscene and hold'em) go to the windows control panel "programs and features" and then select windows options to turn on or off.
Some new and nifty choices to be able to turn on (not in order of coolness):
LPR/LPD
RIP Listener
Services for NFS (now it starting to get interesting)
Administrative tools (yes NFS Server allowed)
Client for NFS
Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (ahh, goodness)
Once those are setup, head on over to microsoft to download a very important add on to "SUA"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=93ff2201-325e-487f-a398-efde5758c47f&DisplayLang=en
From the MS Site this includes:
Overview
Utilities and SDK for UNIX-Based Applications is an add-on to the Subsystem for UNIX-Based Applications (referred to as SUA, hence forth) component that shipped in Microsoft Windows Vista.
This consists of the following components:
- Base Utilities
- SVR-5 Utilities
- Base SDK
- GNU SDK
- GNU Utilities
- UNIX Perl
- Visual Studio Debugger Add-in
This release enables 64-bit application development for SUA. development and porting of custom UNIX applications using the Windows OCI (Oracle Call Interface) and Windows ODBC libraries (collectively referred to as ‘Mixed Mode’ in the rest of the document).
So now we have a compiler, a bit of perl, and some basics for /usr/local/bin, etc. There are a ton of things included in this download. It's 200MB of compressed stuff. But now we are headed towards a useful unix machine that is all running completely native inside Vista.
Two important notes when installing the Utils & SDK from MS. Select custom install and install 'all from hardrive'. During installation of the Utils & SDK based on selecting 'install all' it will ask you 3 questions, check all 3 Windows->Unix specific questions (i.e. case sensitivity)
Not done yet.
Head over to www.interopsystems.com and make life easier on yourself and give them the 30 bucks to let you download the ISO for the 400+ additional tools built for SUA. The place to buy the downloadable ISO is here:
What 400+ utils do you get? Well check out this page for details on that:
I tried doing it the cheap way, one at a time, etc, but downloading the ISO and typing ./install and having it work was pretty convenient.
So now we have a windows setup that can go head to head on a lot of stuff with linux and osx. .
One last thing. I happen to like x-windows. Turns out it isn't easy to find an x-windows server, but I saved you some time on that.
I'm still in my 15 day eval, but 50 bucks is pretty decent considering the now non-existant interop one was 190 bucks and if you head on over to hummingbird and look for xceed that will cost you $750 bucks. Silly.
So without typing 'make' a single time, I have a pretty full-fledged unix setup that lives with Vista very nice. No VM, no seperate machine. All just one happy system.
Very much worth the price of admission and hopefully these steps help out to save time if you are to embark on the project.
This was an extremely round about way to get a native rsync working under windows, but I have that and lots more now.
