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Professor in OS lab: Open up Cygwin and try some Linux commands
Me: Opens up dual boot Ubuntu and runs the commands on Terminal
Professor looks at my system: Is this the latest Windows 10 ?
Me: ...13 -
TLDR: In defense of Powershell - the rant:
I don’t get the Powershell hate.
You don’t hate a screwdriver for not being able to turn a nut, you just *don’t use a screwdriver to turn a nut*
Once you recognize what the tool is good for and you don’t try to use it like Bash, it’s wildly powerful, and satisfying to use in a way Cmd.exe never was.
Cygwin or a Linux Subsystem can only go so far on a Windows computer. You’re dealing with two fundamentally different OS architectures. It makes sense you’d need different tools.
And like it or not, Microsoft owns the non-tech-user desktop , corners the non-tech server business market, and Active Directory is THE tool for managing Windows desktops on a large scale - So Wanblows is not going away anytime soon.
Automation without some weird ass sysVol batch login script is finally possible. Anyone who knows .Net classes can leverage their methods from directly within Powershell. Remote management of headless Windows servers is now a reality. If you have an Office 365 Exchange server you can literally Powershell remote to it for management, just like your favorite cloud hosted Linux distribution.
No one said Windows is a better OS, but an object based shell on an object based OS *makes sense*. It’s useful for its environment. Let it be.10 -
When you ask for a Linux machine and the PM tells you that you can only use Windows and whisper in your ear : you can still use Cygwin ...17
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I need a new 'main' language to do all my projects in as java is kind of grinding away at my psyche.
Golang I liked quite a lot when I used it for my job a year ago, I'll give that a try..
Golang installed and up and working fine.
Oh, I know lets see if there are GLFW bindings for golang. And sure there are lets go!
Oh I need gcc and mingwex + mingw32 which I will acquire through cygwin.
hmm.. mingwex + mingw32 not found and my drive is almost full. I'll reinstall on my D:\ drive before continuing troubleshooting.
> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> Change permissions Access denied.
No problem I just don't own this object!
> Change to be the 'object owner' Success!
> Change permissions Success!
> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> takeown /F C:\Cygwin /A /R /D Y Success!
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
At this point it would be more efficient to manually open up my ssd, and using a fridge magnet change every single bit to be exactly what I want it to be.
Or install linux.
7 -
I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.
It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"
I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".
- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.
And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.
About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.15 -
So I'm writing some multithreaded shit in C that is supposed to work cross-platform. MingW has Posix threads for Windows, so that saved already half of the platform dependency. The other half was that these threads need to run external programs.
Well, there's system(), right? Uhm yes, but it sucks. It's incredibly slow on Windows, and it looks like you can have only one system() call ongoing at the same time. Which kinda defeats the multithreaded driver. Ok, but there's CreateProcessA(), and that doesn't suck.
Fine, now for Linux. The fork/exec hack is quite ugly, but it works and is even fast. Just never use fork() without immediate exec(). First try under Cygwin... crap I fork bombed my system! What is this shit? Ah I fucked up the path names so that the external executable couldn't be run.
Lesson learnt: put an exit() right after the exec() in the path for child process. Should never be reached, but if it goes there, the exit() at least prevents a fork bomb.
Well yeah, sort of works under Cygwin, but only with up to 3 threads. Beyond that, it seems like fork() at some point gives two processes the same PID, and then shit hangs.
Even slapping a mutex around the fork and releasing it only in the parent process didn't help. Fork in Cygwin is like a fork in the ass. posix_spawn() should work better because it can be mapped more easily to the Windows model, but still no dice.
OK, testing under real Linux. Yeah, no issues with that one! But instead, I get some obscure "free(): invalid size" abort. What the fuck would that even mean?! Checking my free() calls: all fine.
Time to fire up GDB in the terminal! Put a catch on the abort signal, mh got just hex data. Shit I forgot to compile with -O0 and -g. Next try. Backtrace shows the full call trace, back to the originating line in my program - which is fclose() on a file.
Ahhh I remember! Under Linux, fclosing a file that is already closed makes the program crash. So probably I was closing it twice. Checking back.. yeah that's where it was.
Shit runs fast on several cores now!8 -
I've never been more glad for ubuntu on Windows. Python dependencies (through babun) were fuckin' me left, right and centre.
2 -
So looking to get started on c++ but have a noob question.
Is there a difference between c++ in Linux vs Visual Studio C++...
kinda don't want to install a Linux OS/cygwin to do it, takes too much space13 -
Fuck you windows 10. Fuck you private keys. Fuck you tortoise git. Fuck you git bash. Fuck you cygwin. Want 3x hours of my life back. Had an auth problem... Had to reinstall all the above on windows to connect to my private repo. Took me 5 minutes to connect after reinstalling all the tools. Grrrrrrr. And I'll never know why it wouldn't connect apart from fatal protocol error: bad line length character..I tried ever stack overflow answer... I nearly bricked my gitlab CE...and it was windows being a motherslut8
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Cygwin fail of my life rm -rf /* instead of rm -rf. /* a week later and I'm still discovering utils that have been removed #fuckingwoops2
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Just installed windows on my Mac.
I don’t know what I’ll do next, install Cygwin on Windows I installed??? 😑7 -
Today was a rather funny day in school. School starts for me at 13:40 because our timetable planners are so qualified for this job.
First 2hrs: Physics, fine its good
Second 2hrs: Discrete Maths (however you want to call it)
Goal is to write a text (30 pages, 10, etc all those standard settings). Teacher prefers Latex over word, but we can do it in word if we want. We could choose a topic, I took primes because it looked the best. I decided to use latex because I'm a fetishist and it simply looks better in the end. A classmate was arguing with our teacher about ides: texmaker vs kile. And I'm like "I use vim". So my teacher is like kk
Later that class, when we actually started doing stuff I started the ssh session to my server because I don't know any good c++ compilers for win and I'm too lazy to get a portable version of cygwin (or whatever its called). So in my server I open vim and start coding my tool for Fermat Primes (Fermatsche Primzahlen, too lazy to actually translate). And this teacher seriously is the best teacher I ever met in my life. Usually teachers are like " dude r u hakin' the school server?" and I'm like bruh its just vim and I'm doing it this way because I cannot code on your PC coz I can't install a compiler. And this teacher is like "oh hey you actually use vi, all cool kids used it in 2000. I first though u were kidding and stuff..." And we continued talking about more of stuff like that and I have to say that this is the first teacher that actually understands me. Phew
Now I'm going to continue writing my 30 pages piece of trash latex doc and hope it'll end good1 -
Changed db host from sles 11 to sles 12...
Users had to set a new pw...
And there is this guy, who is longer in this business,than i am on this world...
Yet i had to show him passwd...
And now he gets back to me with the following:
C: "since the pw reset my password doesn't work"
> Cutout from the error message, which clearly says ssh algorithm negotiation failed
Me: "just to be sure, are your pws set correctly? And what client do you have, where does this message come from?"
C:"i checked the pws, they match. I still get the error."
...
Me: "... And whats your client? Does putty/cygwin still work"
C:"yeah they still work"
...
Me:"and what throws this error?"
C:"uhm Ant"
*Fyi: some version as old as the brown coals used to do some shady db2 and java stuff"
*Me doin a quick googleing for the error and Ant"
Me:"yup... It appears, that the java lib has some problems with the ssh algorithms.. here are some stackoverflow links, which described your problem." *at least make me try, please*
*Waiting for his response, which will surely result in pure enlightenment and bliss for me...*
Seriously... How dares java to fuck this up... -
Finally learned what cygwin is for, and how to use it so I'm finally loving it. I can actually develop on Windows! 😀😀5
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I really wish Emacs had better integration with Windows. Vim is a wonderful text editor, but it just doesn't do everything I used Emacs for. If it were my choice, I'd only use Linux for everything, but unfortunately I have to use other people's computers since my personal system's hard disk is borked, and it's really unfortunate how poorly it works even with Cygwin. Oh well, can't have it all I guess.2
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I hate that when developing on Windows I need like four different terminals. CMD, MINGW64/Cygwin/MSYS2, PowerShell. Each one has different functionality:
CMD - basic Windows commands
MINGW64 - emulates Linux terminal with frequent Linux commands and great support for Git
Powershell - access Windows COM, .NET etc.
Now there are solutions that attempt to solve this like Cmder (which is just more user-friendly ConEmu). These are console emulators which wrap all these in one window (with multiple tabs). But they are slow as hell. I have to wait like 10 seconds each time I start a terminal in Cmder, because the emulators need to run some huge startup scripts. But I just need to run one command from this one freaking folder!
Eventually I end up having like 30 different terminal windows open, each one different in functionality and each time I need to do something I must think about which terminal I need and in which folder. Furthermore I have to think about whether to run the terminal as administrator, but I usually forget that, so I have to close the terminal and reopen as admin. Why don't you just add something like su or sudo, Microsoft?
9 -
As promissed.
Day #1 on THE other project. Nothing fancy, just setting up my dev env. Got a decent pc with all the required network permissions. And this time I got w10 [last year I was working there on w7 pc via rdp from another w7 laptop. Dont ask...]
of course no localadmin rights to set shit up. Downloaded all the installs, found someone who has admin rights to run them. I even managed to get admin powershell!
Ran all installers, enabled long paths support, env vars, tweak here, tweak there,... Installed git bash to at least have a taste of shell. Decided to try out wsl. Enabled the feature, didnt reboot right away.
Rebooted. 2xclick on ubuntu setup and I get an error claiming wsl is not ebabled. Wtf? Did I do it wrong? I see bash command is there now so I must have done it right. After some googling I found out that even though I can enable wsl, it doesnt work on my version of windows. It's too okd they say. Yeah, tx MS, that's very intuitive and user friendly!
Allright, my hopes to habe a decent sub-os died. Git bash it is :( but I miss tmux soooo much. Then I came across smth that caught my eye. Msys2 it's called. Apparently it's based on cygwin and has a pacman package manager! ´pacman -S tmux´ -- hippee-ka-yay motherfuckers! It's not the best terminal emulation, but it works quite allright and it has tmux. And netcat!
Banished to mouseclickerland still managed to find a good enough shell. Yayy!
So there it is. My first day's ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries.
If you know a better shell I could set up on w10, please, share -
I know a lot of people aren't fans of Microsoft here, but does anyone have some extended experience with using powershell?
I've been using it for creating a script that handles quite a large set of tasks for setting up and configuring some application servers and so far I have been really digging the language. Being able to invoke the script against remote hosts in parallel like ansible has been a really cool learning experience.
Admittedly it's verbose as fuck, so getting the same thing done in something like python/perl might be like half the lines of code. And I know that some of the commands illicit a "WTF?" every now and again. But I think one of the powershell tutorials I watched early on in attempting this helped make using powershell not suck ass.
Every command is basically 'verb-noun'. You don't know what the command or switches are:
> get-help "command" -showwindow
It will give you a list of options if you didn't select the exact command with get-help.
It feels* amazingly buttoned up as a scripting language and it's really cool to be able to take advantage of lower level stuff, like you can run alternative shells (we have cygwin installed on some of our servers), you can run C# code, you have access to interfacing with .NET api's. I haven't messed with anything azure yet, but being able to interface with products and services like SQL/Exchange/O365/azure/servers/desktops from the same language seems pretty cool.
Admittedly, the learning curve feels terrible though. I felt like a dunce for the first couple weeks, couldn't navigate the language at all, and was always in the docs trying to figure stuff out. I think I just needed to understand how the people developing powershell intended for it to be used. Once I was able to put two-and-two together about the verb-noun structure and how to find information/examples about the cmdlets it's been quite easy to work with it.
If anyone else has any extended experience with it, please share your thoughts/opinions. Curious to see if your experiences are/were similar to mine.
If you don't have Powershell experience, please feel free to share your opinions of Micro$haft and me for using Micro$haft products too! It's all good 😎9 -
I'm a windows newby, any suggestion for cloning an ext4 disk partition?
At the moment I use cygwin and dd.
8 -
My search for a solution to mintty terminal compatibility seems to be coming to a close (thank god). I know now that having compatibility with cygwin doesn't make sense as far as I can see. Because it's about mintty not cygwin.
But now I have to figure out how to interface with mintty for setting the non-canonical flag and switching stdin to non blocking mode
Oh boy... It's getting closer!1 -
Cygwin, unfortunately my work use Windows machines sobat least if write a few shell scripts for cygwin I've got half a chance that it'll work come Dev / live time
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Okay say I'm compiling a windows binary but I need to call a function from a linux library when running on cygwin. How would one go about doing this? Does it even make sense?
My idea is compiling a dll with one function that links against the linux lib and calls the function. Then just load the dll when needed.
Kinda new to linking stuff so any input is appreciated2
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