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ummm, already exists

ummm, already exists

Posted Feb 23, 2005 17:29 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (guest, #421)
Parent article: How to Kill Linux (PC Magazine)

That means tearing away the entire top of Linux from the driver layer—and that would be MS-Linux.
No, I believe that would be called "Cygwin."


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ummm, already exists

Posted Feb 23, 2005 18:05 UTC (Wed) by phip (guest, #1715) [Link]

...or perhaps coLinux (www.colinux.org)

ummm, already exists

Posted Feb 24, 2005 5:11 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

or NdisWrapper

ummm, already exists

Posted Feb 23, 2005 20:03 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Cygwin isn't really all that similar to Linux. It's another implementation of POSIX with SYSV-style functions and GNU extensions. It's essentially a libc for Windows that is sufficient to build GNU utilities against, and shares nothing with Linux proper aside from the standardized API. You even need a cross-compiler to build for it on Linux.

ummm, already exists

Posted Feb 25, 2005 0:42 UTC (Fri) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

It's the usual GNU/Linux vs. Linux ambiguity. The author clearly meant keeping the userland of GNU/Linux, which is what Cygwin essentially does (they've ported a lot more than just libc!), as opposed to the Linux kernel sans drivers.

ummm, already exists

Posted Feb 25, 2005 4:53 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Well, the GNU/Linux debate is one thing, but if you leave out all of Linux proper, it doesn't make sense to call the remainder "Linux". Has Cygwin actually ported much more than libc? I thought it was mostly a sufficiently good port of libc that most programs would just build against it as if it was a generic UNIX, plus an actual port of X, and probably some autoconf stuff. Certainly the code that I've written that builds under Cygwin doesn't require anything unusual other than the appropriate GCC flags, and some weirdness in the Makefile to deal with the funny filenames of executables.

Of course, in addition to being the code that the Cygwin people wrote, it's also a package system and a distribution, which makes it hard to tell what they needed to modify and what they've just built for you without any changes.

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