It's a *nix under Win32; I'm still a bit a n00ber, and have trashed my install a couple of times, but with some work you can get a GNU build environment (bash was a primary objective).

I haven't tried any X apps yet, but it looks like it's supported too.

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Original post by shamen
Has anyone actually used this? Is it better than cygwin?

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Cygwin was more GNU friendly out-of-the-box, but SFU seems more complete in it's posix/*nix support.

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Original post by mrbastard
so it's kind of a cross-mojination of samba and cygwin? But without any of that naughty open source code?

I've seen it advertised, I'm just not 100% sure what new benefits it brings. Daresay I'm missing something...

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Samba is not needed under Win32, Windows does a better job supporting it's native network filesystem than the GNU version does!
It appears to give you a full Unix shell for Windows (cygwin wasn't quite complete). You can access the local filesystem from the shell too.

You can even run a number of the core utilities under the standard NT cmd shell!

[edited by - Magmai Kai Holmlor on January 23, 2004 9:38:20 PM]

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Original post by Magmai Kai Holmlor
Samba is not needed under Win32, Windows does a better job supporting it''s native network filesystem than the GNU version does!

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That''s kind-of debatable. While the newer versions of Windows have added more features to CIFS than Samba intends to support, the Samba developers claim to have found a number of apparently long-existing, exploitable bugs in Windows'' CIFS implementation (some forum/mailing-list post by one of the developers, Jeremy Allison I think; he refused to give any details on the bugs he refered to and said he''d reported them to Microsoft; I can''t find the link right now...) and have managed to produce a higher performance implementation in at least some ways according to certain benchmarks (of course, benchmarks being benchmarks, they''re to be taken only so seriously).

Given that MS invented the Samba protocol (NetBIOS/NetBEUI) I''d a little skeptical about the Samba team managing to do significantly better. Especially since Samba isn''t quite transparent when compared to Windows Networking, anyway.

There''s a bunch of x apps with SFU, but no X server.

Here''s a cool one X-Win32, but it''s not free. It''s not as expensive as eXceed, but still a buck.

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Original post by Promit
Given that MS invented the Samba protocol (NetBIOS/NetBEUI) I''d a little skeptical about the Samba team managing to do significantly better. Especially since Samba isn''t quite transparent when compared to Windows Networking, anyway.

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Yeah, I mean, look at how MS handles everything else it "invents" and you will see how secure their software is .... What? Oh...Nevermind.

I still can't believe that MS would build a POSIX compat layer in the first place, or do they think POSIX is better than their own Win32 2K/2K3 style? Makes one wonder!

From my experiences it takes quite some registry hacking just to get the MS SMB implementation going well, and even then anyone not on a network your machine is optimized for will still run slow as shit. The only thing the MS SMB imp. is good for is their server software and networking which is in itself not particularly much better if at all from samba and NFS (and ...).

Overall, Samba's SMB imp. is MUCH, MUCH BETTER. I'm guessing that a basic browser and one would be crackin under windows too (one thing however, how the hell do they do smb mounts in win32 using samba on windows? I know XP has NTFS mount points but those things are suicide to work with!).

edit: I remember hearing about something like IBM being the original creator of the SMB protocal, correct me if i'm wrong though.

Lorenz (krysole) Pretterhofer
sleep, caffeine for the weak minded

[edited by - krysole on January 25, 2004 9:03:02 PM]

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Original post by Magmai Kai Holmlor
There''s a bunch of x apps with SFU, but no X server.

Here''s a cool one X-Win32, but it''s not free. It''s not as expensive as eXceed, but still a buck.

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I''ve used x-win32 before through a site licence. It''s great when you tunnel through ssh, but the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. Apple''s X11 for Mac OS X is a bit more ''natural'' unix/xwindows if you ask me.

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Original post by Promit
Given that MS invented the Samba protocol (NetBIOS/NetBEUI) I''d a little skeptical about the Samba team managing to do significantly better. Especially since Samba isn''t quite transparent when compared to Windows Networking, anyway.

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Some people argue that the Samba developers probably know more about the protocol than anyone at Microsoft. This is because they reverse engineered the protocol, while the people at Microsoft are just using the old code, who was written by people who left a long time ago. If it is true or not, I don''t know, but it seems plausible.

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Original post by Magmai Kai Holmlor
Samba is not needed under Win32, Windows does a better job supporting it''s native network filesystem than the GNU version does!

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If samba was ported to windows, there would be no need to pay for Client Access Licenses, so actually, there would be a need for Samba under win32.

I keep reading SFU as "Shut F*ck Up". Doesn''t make sense, I know.