PC Tech Thread

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NotThamesWater in reply to @Velocio

WSLv2

How did I not know about this? I've been dicking around with old oooold binaries from a Berkeley university ftp server from the early 00s to give me *nix like commands and utilities.

Or Cygwin. Is this similar?

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Velocio in reply to @NotThamesWater

This is basically full Linux kernel, virtualised but integrated in such a way that you barely see the startup time, it doesn't impact battery life, and you have a Linux command line (for the Linux VM) that can also access Windows. Additionally you can launch a Linux GUI app from that command line and the GUI will appear within the Windows desktop environment as if it were running within Windows, i.e. I can type wireshark in the Linux command line and Wireshark UI will appear in Windows.

It is so good that most of the dev work on Microcosm in the past couple of years I have done from WSLv2, including compiling the binaries and shipping them to a Linux running on bare metal - meaning it is perfectly byte compatible for the entire build tool chain and the output - this is a Linux.

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NotThamesWater in reply to @Velocio

I like the sound of a seamless VM - I struggle with running *nix VMs in windows in a way that doesn't take acrobatics to share and synchronise files and the like.

How is it at reading e.g. ext4 file systems?

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