I have been working and developing software on Linux, UNIX and Windows for a while. On the Microsoft platforms I started on MS DOS. Last week I was talking with a colleague and he mentioned that while still in BETA, Microsoft has something called Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. I do enjoy the simplicity and power of the Linux shells. I decided to give the Microsoft BETA software a run.
For your info Bash (from Wikipedia):
“Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been distributed widely as it is a default shell on the major Linux distributions and macOS (formerly OS X). In 2016 it was also made available by Microsoft for use in Windows 10 Anniversary Update, albeit it is not installed by default”.
For your info Ubuntu (from Wikipedia):
“Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system for personal computers, tablets and smart phones, where Ubuntu Touch edition is used; and also runs network servers, usually with the Ubuntu Server edition, either on physical or virtual servers (such as on mainframes) and/or with containers, that is with enterprise-class features; runs on the most popular architectures, including server-class ARM-based.
Ubuntu is published by Canonical Ltd, who offer commercial support. It is based on free software and named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu (literally, ‘human-ness’), which Canonical Ltd. suggests can be loosely translated as “humanity to others” or “I am what I am because of who we all are”. Ubuntu is the most popular operating system running in hosted environments, so–called “clouds”, as it is the most popular server Linux distribution”.
For your info Windows (from Wikipedia):
“Microsoft Windows (or simply Windows) is a meta family of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of several families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry with the OS typically associated with IBM PC compatible architecture. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Embedded Compact (Windows CE) or Windows Server”.
To get to the installation instructions and documentation please go to the following URL: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about#
The software claims to be User Mode Linux and Tools for Windows. The software is not running on a VM. It runs on its own subsystem. The software is still in preview (as of December 08, 2016) or BETA mode.
Before you install the software you need to take care of a reduce number of prerequisites.
- Your PC must be running a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Anniversary Update build 14393 or later.
- You must turn-on Developer Mode.
- You must enable the “Windows Subsystem for Linux (beta)” feature via the GUI or the command-line.
- Need to reboot your computer.
At this point what is left is downloading the software. That part is incredibly simple. It takes a few minutes to download and install Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.
- Open a command prompt on your computer.
- On the command prompt type the following:
C:\> bash
— Beta feature —
This will install Ubuntu on Windows, distributed by Canonical
and licensed under its terms available here:
https://aka.ms/uowterms
Type “y” to continue: y
Downloading from the Windows Store… 100%
Extracting filesystem, this will take a few minutes…
Please create a default UNIX user account. The username does not need to match your Windows username.
For more information visit: https://aka.ms/wslusers
Enter new UNIX username: John
Enter new UNIX password: **********
Retype new UNIX password: **********
passwd: password updated successfully
Installation successful!
The environment will start momentarily…
Documentation is available at: https://aka.ms/wsldocs
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$
That is all folks!!! I have to admit that the installation was painless.
I entered a couple more commands as illustrated in the following screen capture:
C:\> bash
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$ pwd
/mnt/c
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$ whoami
John
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$ exit
exit
C:\>
From then on, each time you wish to start the bash shell, you just need to enter the bash command. Each time the software will check and if needed install updates. Clean and simple!!!
To determine what the shell is running at the bash prompt enter:
C:\> bash
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$
To find out the type of processor you have installed on your PC, you may use the following:
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 44
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5606 @ 2.13GHz
stepping : 2
microcode : 0xffffffff
cpu MHz : 2128.000
cache size : 256 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 6
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid dca sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt aes
bogomips : 4256.00
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:
processor : 1
::::::::::::::::::::::::
processor : 2
::::::::::::::::::::::::
processor : 3
::::::::::::::::::::::::
processor : 4
::::::::::::::::::::::::
processor : 5
::::::::::::::::::::::::
processor : 6
::::::::::::::::::::::::
processor : 7
::::::::::::::::::::::::
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$
For space reasons, I have removed part of the output. My PC has two CPUs each with four cores. This is exactly what the output of the file indicates.
From the bash prompt one is able to access the NTFS file system used by windows as illustrated by the following screen capture:
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/sdm/source$ pwd
/mnt/c/sdm/source
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/sdm/source$ ls -al
total 7688
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Nov 21 10:48 .
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 0 Apr 28 2016 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17838 Jan 26 2016 cachelistthread.c
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14752 Jan 29 2016 cacheslistthread.c
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17492 Apr 17 2016 casappendtrailer.c
::::::::::::::::::::::::
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16379 Feb 8 2016 unlockthread.c
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20782 Jan 14 2016 updatecwmthread.c
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13050 May 11 2015 xmlthread.c
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/sdm/source$
The files in the selected folder are part of the source code for the storage server I developed at work. The server runs on the .NET platform.
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c$ cd Temp
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$ ls -l hel*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8519 Dec 8 14:12 hello
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 68 Dec 8 14:05 hello.c
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Oct 18 11:08 hello.txt
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$
Seems like we have a file with the name hello.c for which we will display its contents:
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$ cat hello.c
#include <stdio.h>
main () {
printf(“main <<< hello world\n”);
}
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$
The source code contains the typical hello world example. Now, take a look at the following:
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$ gcc hello.c -o hello
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$ ./hello
main <<< hello world
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$
The program was compiled and executed!!! It is not a Windows but a Linux executable as illustrated by:
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Temp$ readelf -h hello
ELF Header:
Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Class: ELF64
Data: 2’s complement, little endian
Version: 1 (current)
OS/ABI: UNIX – System V
ABI Version: 0
Type: EXEC (Executable file)
Machine: Advanced Micro Devices X86-64
Version: 0x1
Entry point address: 0x400440
Start of program headers: 64 (bytes into file)
Start of section headers: 4472 (bytes into file)
Flags: 0x0
Size of this header: 64 (bytes)
Size of program headers: 56 (bytes)
Number of program headers: 9
Size of section headers: 64 (bytes)
Number of section headers: 30
Section header string table index: 27
If you try the same command with a program built on Windows you would get something like:
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/sdm/bin$ readelf -h sdm.exe
readelf: Error: Not an ELF file – it has the wrong magic bytes at the start
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/sdm/bin$
By the way, gcc did not come installed in the Ubuntu distribution. I had to do it by hand. To illustrate the process, I will now install for the first time Git:
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Users/John$ sudo -s
sudo: unable to resolve host CONDOR
root@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Users/John# whoami
root
root@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Users/John# apt-get install git
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libfreetype6 os-prober
Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
git-man liberror-perl
Suggested packages:
git-daemon-run git-daemon-sysvinit git-doc git-el git-email git-gui gitk
gitweb git-arch git-bzr git-cvs git-mediawiki git-svn
The following NEW packages will be installed:
git git-man liberror-perl
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 56 not upgraded.
Need to get 3,306 kB of archives.
After this operation, 21.9 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main liberror-perl all 0.17-1.1 [21.1 kB]
Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main git-man all 1:1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3 [699 kB]
Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main git amd64 1:1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3 [2,586 kB]
Fetched 3,306 kB in 4s (757 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package liberror-perl.
(Reading database … 29264 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack …/liberror-perl_0.17-1.1_all.deb …
Unpacking liberror-perl (0.17-1.1) …
Selecting previously unselected package git-man.
Preparing to unpack …/git-man_1%3a1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3_all.deb …
Unpacking git-man (1:1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3) …
Selecting previously unselected package git.
Preparing to unpack …/git_1%3a1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3_amd64.deb …
Unpacking git (1:1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3) …
Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1ubuntu1) …
Setting up liberror-perl (0.17-1.1) …
Setting up git-man (1:1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3) …
Setting up git (1:1.9.1-1ubuntu0.3) …
root@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Users/John# exit
exit
John@CONDOR:/mnt/c/Users/John$ exit
exit
C:\>
Just like if you were running Ubuntu on your PS.
If you are a software developer and deal with Linux or UNIX, the Bash on 
Ubuntu on Windows is something you might wish to add to your toolkit.
If you have comments or questions regarding this or any other post in this blog please do not hesitate and send me a message. I will not use your name unless you explicitly let me know.
John
john.canessa@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter: @john_canessa