Nix on Windows

Larry Qualig

- I haven't look recently, but last time I did it lacked a bash shell. (Yeah, yeah, third party unsupported download available. But as sfu offers me nothing I want that I don't already have, at a price (not monetary) that I am unwilling to pay, why bother?)

- Parts of the eula are unacceptable to me -- a show stopper.

- Last version I saw installed none of the gnu based utilities by default. If you wanted gcc etc you needed to install them manually, and that required a reboot. Not ideal on a server.

- There was an x windows client, but no server. That feels backwards, or at least incomplete, to me. Third party download available, etc. etc.

- It emphasises telnet. ssh is available only if you chase down and install a third party version. (See above).

- sudo is missing. I hear the same is true for python, cvs, gmake, apache, emacs, and probably a whole swag of others I consider pretty stock standard.

- Centralised authentication and support for nfs-nis etc is nifty. But it may only be installed on at least Windows 2000 Server running on a domain controller (specified in the eula section 1.b). Another show stopper for me, for a number of reasons (security, cost, space, unacceptable eula for win2003).

- The brief period I spent on such a system, it felt like I was back in 1990. I particularly felt the shortcomings of their commandline editing (limited) and completion (basically, there didn't seem to be any).

I'm sure there is enough there for at least some organisations to get good utility out of this beasty, but to me it looks both "not that good" and incomplete. The only place I've seen it running was a small tertiary college, where it was used as part of their networking courses, and where it was also not that stable. But thats a rather harsh environment.

As an aside, isn't sfu included in win2003 server?

-- Regards, Jim