Turning Win32 machines into something useful

Obviously, the "most" right solution is to eleminate your Windows installtion and install FreeBSD or something similar, but in case you need some less drastic solution, read this page.

The following should work both on Windows 95 and Windows NT (all real Win32 platforms).

1. Create a homedir: "/home/cracauer" or whatever, but it should be on C: (see below).

2. Set the following variables in 'system proterties/environment':
   • extend $path to whereever you plan to install your news tools (/unixtools), maybe with leading C:
   • set $HOME to your home directory.
   • $USER to your user name. Your user name should be Unix-compatible, that means no special letters and not longer than 8 chars.

3. Get some useful stuff:

   ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32

   is a full set of GNU tools, including a gcc version that has a Posix-enabled library that doesn't prevent you from using win32 things (sockets etc.), the bash shell (including filename and programname completion) etc.

   Please note that these GNU-Win32 tools have the in common that the author's primary intention is to make a framework where Unix sources can be used as unchanged as possible. The obvious problem is that handling for filesystem valume letters ("C:") is not part of Unix. The shared library of these tools tries to map filenames like '//D:/foobar' to the right place, but that may fail depending of what the program does with the path. Additionally, there is a mount` command. You can do `mount D: /d`, then you can access the contents of D: without a volume letter. The trick is to have a global list of mountpoints for all GNU-Win32 programs, inplemented in the common shared library.

   Anyway, the point about this toolset is to be able to compile Posix programs without using the Microsoft-supplied Posix environment. The latter doesn't allow you to mix Win32 and Posix calls (you can do this with GNU-Win32), you can't even use sockets and the Posix lib has moved out of Visual C++ anyway, you need to buy another package from Microsoft to get the crap.

   At this point of installtion, you have at least a working Unix-compatible 'rm, with support for '-r' and '-f'. You should take the obvious analogy and try 'rm -rf /', just in case you're not longer sure you really want to tangle with Windows anymore.

   http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs.html

   is where you can get binaries of emacs-19.xx. Please note that the original GNU Emacs sources compile and install on Windows NT without problems (if you have Visual C++). The above are just binaries of unchanged sources, not a port.

   Emacs on NT has 'M-x shell' support. You get command-line editing for every commandline-editing tool (like ftp), backward scrolling in the emacs buffer and you can search in this buffer. 'Curses'- using tools (whatever that is called in DOS, I mean non-graphics cursor-addressing programs) will not work, of course. This feature is just what you have under Unix Emacs.

   It has dired-support, so you can get around some less intuitive tools proved with NT. Changing permissions isn't support yet.

   http://www.itribe.net/virtunix/mystuff.html
   http://www.itribe.net/virtunix/
   http://www.itribe.net/virtunix/otherstuff.html

   some additional stuff, df, dd, ps, kill :-]

   This site include a link to a working version of unzip.exe (many version with long filename support can' handle packages like these)

To "C:" or not to "C:"?

This problem becomes a real hassle when it comes to environment variable settings. $HOME need to be set for a lot of tools, so should it include "C:" or not?

The only workaround I found is to avoid using letters as much as possible. It is absolutly necessary to have your home directory on the same partition your Unix tools are on, so $HOME and the local variables of the tools will point to the same partition.

Things you should know about to feel at least a bit warmer.

• I found vim to be the best vi clone on NT (include drive letter support).
• You can set the commandline-editing behaviour to default to 'insert', not 'overwrite' (which it did since doskey.com in 1986)

• You can change the color of command windows to be green on black

• Things you can do in the NT shell, finally:
  • use the '*' in cd commands so you don't have to type in the full directory name, like cd emacs*`.

• You can use '/ as a pathname seperator in nearly every application, with the exception of the NT shell (that would be difficult because '/' is the commandline-option switch char).
• There are tools to exchange the Caps-Lock and the left control key. Forgot the place, didn't work on Nt 4.0 yet.

Things that may get in your way

• Permission handling on NT is
  • different from Unix
  • difficult to support even for native NT tools
  • most Windows developers don't care about them, including Microsoft's

  So, almost every tools to copy, more or restore files will totally screw up the permission settings of your files. It's a shame, really.

  As soon as I use the NT box to store important data, I'll at least run a nightly script to make a list of files and their permissions, so at least I can look up the former state.

• NTFS is slow. On my machines 2 times slower than FAT. Since setting permissions will be sissiphus-work anyway, I would seriously consider using a FAT filesystem on your NT box, export nothing and use Samba on a Unix box to distribute your files.

So, why should you *not* use Windows NT?

• Instable. I don't mean it panics all over the place or such. Just Font support suck up system-wide for me more than once and that's a thing you fix by reboot.

• You have to reboot for tasks where a Unix system doesn't have to be rebooted. A Unix system can set IP addresses, routes, nameserver setting while it is running. I think it is funny to have an OS with loadable drivers and then make it been rebootet when you want to use the device...

• The worst the the need to reboot when installing WWW browsers like the Internet explorer.

• Internet Explorer has a lot of nice features, especially beeing useable without a moure. I *really* like this feature. However, I can't say it works stable :-(

• Although I hate Motif programs even more than Windows applications, when I can't avoid using a GUI program (Netscape etc.), I really need X11's capability to drag and drop text from almost every place where text is shown. For example, I can copy a URL from an emacs buffer and drop it into the "URL:" window of Netscape. What am I supposed to do in Windows? Type it in again? Hah! Never! I found the easiest way to feed new urls into Windows browsers to always have a browser-accessible file open, cut'n paste the Url therein and then reload the File into the browser. Braindead...

• No virtual desktop support. Even the lowest-tech X11 windows managers with 64 KB binary size have multiple desktop support. Can't be that hard, or what?

• More to come...

©2007 Martin Cracauer $Id: win32-useful.html4m,v 1.4 1997/04/29 15:31:15 cracauer Exp $