[GTALUG] Any experience with "Linux on Windows"?

[Peter King]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 07:53:31PM -0500, Paul King via talk wrote:
 
> Anyone have experiences with these weird versions of Linux  running on
> Windows? I would like to hear about it. Any experience with how it would
> look with a dual monitor?

The real payoff is supposed to come Real Soon Now -- probably April:in WSL
2, the Linux kernel itself will receive system calls, running on a trimmed
down version of the Hyper-V hypervisor, hosting files on a virtual ext4
disk.  It will be sort of like running VirtualBox, but outside the Box.

Right now there is a layer that translates kernel calls into Windows calls.
It works surprisingly well.

I have been running Debian-on-Windows (Win10 Pro) for a few months now. It
doesn't run X11.  There are complicated workarounds for this, but since I
do most of my work at the console, it doesn't bother me.  YMMV.  Otherwise
apt-get works as you'd expect, and so far everything runs very smoothly;
WSL 1 uses an older, conservative version of Debian stable, and I haven't
been tempted to run testing.  (Well, okay, I've been tempted, but so far
I haven't given in.)  Have WSL take over the whole screen and it's very
much like running Debian from the console normally.

It's pretty easy to share files between WSL and Windows: the normal windows
drive is automagically mounted at /mnt/c/.  Then you just read/write to it.

On the whole the integration is rather good.  I haven't tried pushing the
limits, mostly because I haven't needed to.  Windows 10 Pro seems to be one
of the occasional "solid" releases of Windows -- I haven't had it crash on
me yet, or even misbehave, and things work more or less as you'd expect.
However, I don't really know anything about Windows; this is the first time
I've even tried it since Win 3.1, so I'm no expert.

WSL 1 runs fine (in terminal/console mode) on a second monitor.  It's easy
and seamless to go from the Linux environment to Windows, and vice-versa.

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king at utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		   (416)-946-3170 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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