Re: [PLUG] POSSIBLE TALK

Might be of interest:

https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL-DistroLauncher

Of the things that don’t work and never will:

Direct hardware access, to pretty much any device

Raw network sockets (with some caveats and qualifiers)

Things that might work someday, but would require some or a lot of work from upstream:

SystemD and other init systems (SFL does not *boot*, it just starts a shell. It’s closer to a chroot than a VM.)

d-bus (reasons similar to SystemD and hardware access. MS has said they are open to implementing the kernel-side things needed.)

Things that work, with qualifiers or workarounds:

Graphical Linux apps. Requires lots of patches and hacks, or an external X server (MinGW/MobaXterm/Cygwin/other)

Things that just plain work, subject to the above lists:

simple CLI utilities, ncurses/TUI tools, simple access to network resources (you can reach out, but not back in, it’s very similar to a NAT layer), limited access to host OS filesystems (SFL lives inside an overlayfs, to provide/preserve/maintain permissions, attributes, and security)

On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 17:51 Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 09:42:52PM +0000, Rich Mingin (PLUG) wrote:
> Actually.....
>
> To be excessively pedantic, SFL doesn’t. The default distro packaged with
> early versions of SFL was Ubuntu, but SFL itself is just a kernel-to-kernel
> shim and a POSIX translation layer. Even first party, in the Windows Store,
> there are Ubuntu, Debian 9, and SLES and OpenSuSE packages. If you don’t
> mind sourcing your own rootfs, you can run any distro you’d like, I’m
> generally running Arch most of the time in mine. I find the rolling distro
> thing works hand in hand with Windows features that are under heavy
> development.
>
> Also, Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (1710) and previous had some gotchas
> about updates, in partcular bash and glibc tended to trigger a threading
> logic error, but Windows 10 1803 update that just came out addressed that
> and the last few other bugs I knew of in SFL. If you have to run Windows,
> at least you can have your tools handy.

That's good to know. When I was trying it out I think Ubuntu was the
only option. It's quite possible I didn't look any further than that,
since that's what I'm used to.

The early versions were pretty buggy, too. The main reason I switched
to tmux was that screen didn't work. I seem to recall emacs having
some issues as well. Pretty much anything involving D-Bus was
problematic.
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