Ubuntu on Windows is here, first thoughts.

For Windows 10 users who have the Insider preview enabled, who have the slider all the way to the bleeding edge side (fast track means all the way to the right), a new preview windows build will become visible and ready to install within about 24-48 hours after you switch to the fast ring.

After that you have to enable the new Windows Subsystem for Linux (beta) and make sure in the system settings that Developer mode is enabled. After that you should open a command prompt and make sure that the use legacy console checkbox is not checked in your command prompt (conhost) properties.

Now open a console window and type bash. The system will install. If you get an 0x80070057 error and you skipped past the link above about legacy console go back, and listen to me next time.  If you get a different error then try Googling the Error Message.

Once you have it installed, you will be in one of several different mental states. If you are like me and you have been using Linux (and other Unix operating systems) since before anyone thought of slicing bread, then you will have lots of fun things you will want to try.  If you are familiar with basics of working in the commandline environment in a Debian or Ubuntu variant of Linux, you will know that it uses apt-get to install packages from repositories, which are configured in /etc/apt/sources.list.  If you open that file you will see that this is not some customized set of binaries created by Canonical (the parent company that releases Ubuntu) so that you can pretend to run Linux binaries.  These are real Linux binaries, unmodified from their real ubuntu versions.  You are running a Linux userland on windows.  On what does it run? Is there a Linux kernel? No.  If you know how Posix environments (broadly compatible Unix implementations claim some level of interoperability and commandline shell compatibility) you know you type uname to find out about the kernel.  Let's do that:

root@localhost:/etc/apt# uname -a
Linux localhost 3.4.0+ #1 PREEMPT Thu Aug 1 17:06:05 CST 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_
64 GNU/Linux




So right there I'm surprised.  I would have expected Microsoft to have their Linux subsystem for Windows report something other than 3.4.0+ as the kernel version. That ought to make a person think when they see that.  This means they implemented all the system calls (syscalls) that things like libc would invoke on a real system. This is zero overhead, extremely efficient, and is a relatively large amount of API surface area for the Windows team to take on.   This is not Steve Ballmer's Microsoft, this is Satya Nadella's Microsoft, and it's kind of awesome.

  The performance here is native. The ABI (binary interface) between userland and kernel is at a 3.4.0 level, but it's not exactly perfect because there will be APIs that are in Linux that the Microsoft emulation layer will not emulate perfectly, at least not yet.   This should impress you.  If this does not impress you, you really don't know what this is doing, and you should remedy that lack of knowledge about windows.   Subsystems are a powerful concept that has lain dormant in Windows since the death of the Windows NT subsystems for Posix, which Microsoft grudgingly brought about to win some big US government contract, and then let wither and die.

Now let's talk about those of you who still have their heads in the sands about the importance of Linux. Why is Microsoft putting a pure Ubuntu "userland" experience for developers (not for production server use) into Windows?  They've been pretty clear. For Developers, Developers, Developers. If you are a developer and you still have no skills at all on Linux systems, then you have your head firmly in the sand my friend, and should fix it.  If you have no prior knowledge of Linux at all, I highly recommend installing a full real Linux environment in a virtual machine and spending some time learning it and using it.   If you expect to be employable in the future, as a server side developer in the future, and you don't plan to only work for small desktop/workgroup codebases for the rest of your life, then Linux systems, containers, cloud technologies, cluster scale technologies, and big data technologies are all something you can just ignore.  Continue to play with your datasets and your data aware controls, and live in your own tiny 1990s world.

I will write a second post on getting started on Linux shell in Windows, and on possible things that might be useful for Delphi developers to learn first in a second post. For now, I suggest you create a VM and install the latest ubuntu.  No matter what you do, you will learn more in that, than you will from playing with this beta ubuntu on windows.

Some things you might like to try:

apt-get install joe
Then run the joe editor:
joe hello.txt

Note that joe (joes own editor) uses those Ctrl+K Ctrl+B / Ctrl+k Ctrl+K type shortcuts you might remember as a Pascal/Delphi old-timer.  These Ctrl+K based set of shortcuts actually predate delphi/pascal and come from the 1970s WordStar editor/text-processing system, which first appeared on CP/M.   Guess which platform TurboPascal supported even before it supported IBM PC on DOS? That's right!  CP/M on Z80.

Some more nostalgia, anyone?

apt-get install fp-ide
then run it
fp

Well that wasn't really perfect yet. I guess this thing has bugs.  (Update 1:The screenshot below is messed up because the command prompt font was set wrong.)

What else has pascal in the description?  Type apt-cache search pascal.


This seems like a great place to be in 2016, with the public road-map for Delphi showing that Linux support is important to them.  I would love to be able to build and dev-test with a local gdb debugger against a server side service built in Delphi.

Update:  Here's FP ide with the font fixed in my command prompt (Lucida console works!) and rocking out like it's 1992: