Running Bash on Ubuntu on Windows: Demo

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Mattias Geniar, March 31, 2016

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Microsoft surprised everyone last night when they announced that Ubuntu is running natively in Windows 10. That means we get all the Ubuntu/Linux perks in the Windows world.

Microsoft has also released a demo of Ubuntu/Bash running on Windows.

What follows are screen captures of Bash running inside Windows. If we combine this with Microsoft porting OpensSSH to the platform too, we suddenly have an environment we can manage with a unix mindset. That means:

  1. Git pre/post commit hooks written in bash
  2. A native package manager (apt)
  3. All our Linux scripts and tools working within Windows

Screenshots of Bash on Windows

As provided by the demo, here are some screencaptures of Bash and Ubuntu running in Linux.

Very impressive stuff. It covers Linux binaries (ELF), mountpoints, apt installing, running a Webrick-like webserver, …

1_windows_ubuntu_lsb_release

2_windows_ubuntu_elf

3_windows_ubuntu_mountpoints.png

4_windows_ubuntu_gcc

5_windows_ubuntu_apt

6_windows_ubuntu_rackup

I’m curious about the quirks and caveats Ubuntu/Bash on Windows will bring, but I’m excited about the possibilities here!

If you want to know more, check out the video.

But now I can’t decide if I should categorise this post as “Windows” or “Linux”. Confusing times ahead!



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