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Ubuntu Windows 10 Bash

As someone who cut their teeth on early versions of Unix, ane thing I've really missed on Windows is the wide variety of powerful and flexible commands that come up along with most Unix distros. As a applied thing, the Windows vanquish (and PowerShell) take grown over time to provide substantially the same capabilities, but why relearn everything? Specially for those of united states who also take Linux-based dev systems, and Linux-based servers, it is really painful to take to do everything two unlike means. Cygwin is nice, but not really seamless or all-encompassing. And then I couldn't await to try out Canonical's Ubuntu for Windows when Microsoft announced information technology would go office of Windows x. I snagged the Insider build as before long as it was available, and and then far, have not been disappointed.

Getting Ubuntu on your Windows 10 organisation

Presumably this will be piece of cake once the final "Anniversary Edition" of Windows 10 ships, but for at present it involves a few steps. For starters, you demand the latest Windows Insider preview build 14316 installed. Then, you need to make sure you accept Developer Manner enabled in Settings, and add together the Windows Feature for "Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta)" (which may in turn require a reboot). And so you can blazon fustigate at a command prompt, and the organization will download a compressed Ubuntu file system, extract information technology, put your deejay drives under /mnt, and you're expert to get! Microsoft's full set of instructions and disclaimers are online.

Bring your environment with you

It'south a existent productivity aid to take your favorite aliases available wherever you lot're working, and so the beginning thing I wanted to effort was to bring over a .bashrc. I've gotten pretty lazy near my "." files over the years, so I figured my simple i wasn't a real exam. Instead, I snagged this adequately circuitous, 99-line, .bashrc file, that tested out fine on my CentOS-powered server, and information technology did equally well on my Windows ten + Ubuntu organization. Cool!

Packages, look we get packages

Ubuntu on Windows 10 is surprisingly complete. Here I snagged the packages needed to add gitSomehow, no matter how much I read that this was "really" Ubuntu, I kept expecting something adequately limited, and certainly didn't await I could simply grab packages. Just there it was, apt-get. I almost didn't dare try it, but it worked! For example, git is not part of the default installation, only information technology was easy enough to have the needed packages retrieved and installed with a single command.

Mac Envy — GONE

Every bit a longtime Sun employee, my favorite version of Unix has always been BSD. So I was actually jealous that all my Mac-owning friends could use all the great commands that I'd gotten used to — want to get a file, use rcp (aka scp); want to archive, utilize tar, or gzip; and so on. The great thing well-nigh mod distros is that they've by and large absorbed all the possible Unix command sets into one big, glorious one. So these command are all pretty much either at that place, or can exist aliased to a newer version (similar vi to vim).

Glitches and limits

There are definitely some oddities when running in Ubuntu. For example here, even though I'm 'root' I can't get file attributes on some system files.Microsoft is very clear that this is a super-early release. As they state, the terminal emulation isn't perfect. Many of the control characters don't do what they should, and top doesn't work correct, for case. Only I was amazed at how well all the bones stuff works.

At some bespeak you exercise hit the limits of what's possible. For case, there is a netstat command, simply information technology can't find the devices it expects under /proc, so information technology doesn't written report much. I guess I can imagine even that being fixed earlier the final shipment, just it'due south a pretty modest price to pay to take a few system commands not work.