Hi
Forgive my ignorance but I haven't seen any discussion about this on
GRASS lists yet.
I have just read about Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) [1] -
a UNIX subsystem that integrates with the Windows kernel as the Win32
subsystem does. Unlike Cygwin which runs on top of the Windows shell as
an emulator, SFU implements a true UNIX peer to the Windows shell,
which provides better performance (I heard that GRASS happens to be
slow in Cygwin).
I was wondering if SFU could be help for Windows GRASS users.
SFU provides Korn and C shells, most UNIX core utilities, perl, python,
gcc etc. More are available from [2], eg. BASH.
A problem is that it doesn't work on Windows 9x, Windows XP Home or
Windows Vista.
There's a detailed description of components and functionality on [3].
[1]http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&displaylang=en
[2]http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/default.aspx
[3]http://www.softpanorama.org/Unixification/SFU/index.shtml
Maciek
On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 11:06 +0200, Maciej Sieczka wrote:
Hi
Forgive my ignorance but I haven't seen any discussion about this on
GRASS lists yet.
I have just read about Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) [1] -
a UNIX subsystem that integrates with the Windows kernel as the Win32
subsystem does. Unlike Cygwin which runs on top of the Windows shell as
an emulator, SFU implements a true UNIX peer to the Windows shell,
which provides better performance (I heard that GRASS happens to be
slow in Cygwin).
I was wondering if SFU could be help for Windows GRASS users.
SFU provides Korn and C shells, most UNIX core utilities, perl, python,
gcc etc. More are available from [2], eg. BASH.
Bah. 
A problem is that it doesn't work on Windows 9x, Windows XP Home or
Windows Vista.
That's reason enough not to use it.
There's a detailed description of components and functionality on [3].
[1]http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&displaylang=en
[2]http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/default.aspx
[3]http://www.softpanorama.org/Unixification/SFU/index.shtml
Unfortunately, they've MSized it, making it less easy to use as a
drop-in replacement. Some of the string handling functions require some
extra "finesse" (eg. macros) to compile properly. I'm sure there's
other differences. At least they're finally POSIX.1 compliant.
Cygwin will hopefully be a thing of the past, soon.
--
Brad Douglas <rez touchofmadness com> KB8UYR/6
Address: 37.493,-121.924 / WGS84 National Map Corps #TNMC-3785
Maciej Sieczka wrote:
Forgive my ignorance but I haven't seen any discussion about this on
GRASS lists yet.
There's been a lot of "would SFU be useful" discussion, which
invariably stalls at "possibly; it would be nice if someone actually
tries it".
I have just read about Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) [1] -
a UNIX subsystem that integrates with the Windows kernel as the Win32
subsystem does. Unlike Cygwin which runs on top of the Windows shell as
an emulator, SFU implements a true UNIX peer to the Windows shell,
which provides better performance (I heard that GRASS happens to be
slow in Cygwin).
Everything's slow in Cygwin.
I was wondering if SFU could be help for Windows GRASS users.
Possibly; it would be nice if someone actually tries it. 
It's more likely to be useful as an alternative to MSys than to
Cygwin. I suspect that SFU isn't going to be sufficiently Unix
compatible to replace Cygwin (there's more to Unix than just POSIX).
--
Glynn Clements <glynn@gclements.plus.com>