Re: tlug: X Windows client

[Jason Molenda <crash@example.com>]

On Wed, Dec 17, 1997 at 05:03:42PM -0000, Felix Morley Finch wrote:

> 
> 10 years ago or so I found a set of unix commands for dos from MKS.  I
> have no idea what the state of these utilities is now, cost,
> availability, no idea at all.  But it came as close to a unix shell
> and unix commands as possible.  Used forward slashes, used temp files
> to simulate piping, etc.


As of two years ago, MKS still existed and was making a POSIX.1 suite
of utilities available for DOS and Win32 OSes.  They were pretty faithful
to what a normal user would expect, but I found when I did a lot of heavy
shell bashing, they came up short.  Small bugs and such in things like
sed.  These were not things normal people would notice, and that was 
a few years ago.

There is also the cygwin32 project that Cygnus is doing, over at
http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-win32
We made a DLL (cygwin.dll) which provides a Unix (POSIX.2) API to
programs, so porting a unix program to NT/95 just involves linking
against this DLL.  The beta that is up for download is a bit old and a
bit slow; when the next version goes up it should be pretty
impressive.  Included are many of the GNU shell and file utilities,
including bash.  Gcc et al are also included, and are capable of
generating Win32 programs.

There is also DJGPP at http://www.delorie.com/ (I believe), but DJ is
mostly concentrating on porting GCC to DOS so that doesn't provide all
kinds of Unix utilities.  It's a pretty impressive how much he's
accomplished; I think he's got GCC so it can rebuild itself under DOS

Jason
---------------------------------------------------------------
TLUG Meeting: To be announced
---------------------------------------------------------------
a word from the sponsor:
TWICS - Japan's First Public-Access Internet System
www.twics.com  info@example.com  Tel:03-3351-5977  Fax:03-3353-6096