Microsoft is bringing the Bash shell to Windows 10

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Wow. This is awesome. Does this mean 'bye bye' to powershell?

Its not even April Fools Day yet.

I'm still flabbergasted that Microsoft has come out to support this. They are many things I don't expect Microsoft to ever do and this would be near the top of the list of things they would not do... and yet they did it.

I think Hell has frozen over.

omg. could you imagine if this was an early april fools joke? People would be pissed... I would be.

They actually showed it at the Build Conference...so it is for real. Otherwise, yeah it would be the sickest April Fools joke.

I dunno how I feel about this. From one side, the Linux purist in me is having a stroke, but on the other hand, I'm happy to see developers on Windows getting some actual tools to work with. Every time I tried to use powershell, I said fuck it and changed the server over to RHEL. Hopefully this will be a server thing as well.

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Here's an article from The Verge with a video demo from MS, if anybody wants it. I'm interested to see where this goes; could be very cool or a total mess.

And just 'cause I can't resist using this GIF:

So, and looking for a consensus here, should I be learning BASH now as an admin?

Yes, just yes.

BASH is much more powerful than powershell.

That's good, powershell is ass. I hated learning it, and I hate using it.

So, where do I start? What's a good point?

  1. as an admin, you're best off knowing Linux, because choosing to spin up a Linux distro instead of another server 2012 R2 instance will save you about 4GiB of ram at the minimum, and 20ish GiB of disk space, 10GiB of bandwidth from updates and 40 minutes of waiting for it to finish.
  2. to actually answer your question, it's not a bad idea to learn, and it's really easy.

@K4KFH This looks like a cool toy, but I'd be interested to see what the overhead looks like. Sounds like they, for lack of a better term, reverse engineered Linux, slapped an ABI onto NT and talked to canonical and had them build a tarball for them.

Also, Windows: get the fuck away from drive letters. It doesn't need to work that way, you're overcomplicating everything.

/mnt/c/dev/ == C:/

This. This is bad. Linux is designed to operate under one unified filesystem.

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This is a good starting point.

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Just finished watching the video @K4KFH linked. TL;DR full GNU environment (Linux is the kernel people, Microsoft took everything except the kernel, so no linux) running on windows with an ABI that looks like Linux.

I started to throw linux on some old poweredges we have sitting around but didn't really know where to start. I was just going to use it as a file server but I wasn't sure where to start giving file permissions and such. Windows is what I've used since I was a kid so it's familiar and easy, and I like server 2012 and Hyper-V a bunch.

That said, I did give it a good shot because I'm a believer in Linux. This is my nudge to go learn it for real though.

Well I'll start tomorrow. Thanks. I didn't think that would be on code academy.

There's an Ace up someone's sleeve....

here is another really good source for learning some useful stuff to get started with basic set ups

here is a great source for preconfigured stuff.

https://www.turnkeylinux.org/

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I started to throw linux on some old poweredges we have sitting around but didn't really know where to start. I was just going to use it as a file server but I wasn't sure where to start giving file permissions and such. Windows is what I've used since I was a kid so it's familiar and easy, and I like server 2012 and Hyper-V a bunch.

That said, I did give it a good shot because I'm a believer in Linux. This is my nudge to go learn it for real though.

For linux fileservers, which are badass because they can run on 512MB of ram, look at freenas, rockstor and nas4free. They're basically turnkey solutions that have nice web interfaces to manage everything. My recommendation is either freenas or rockstor.

If you need a hand with any linux stuff, feel free to post in the helpdesk. I'll be happy to provide specific solutions and help you work through problems you're having. It's sort of my addiction.

Also, if you like hyper-v, you'll be in love with KVM/QEMU. It's virtualisation on the linux kernel. Might not have feature parity to hyper-v, but it's good enough for my system. If you need enterprise-grade virtualisation though, your best bet is probably either VMWare or hyper-v though.

Thanks. I've kept telling myself I was going to dig into it, but kept putting it off. I loaded up linux on my computer at home once and was enjoying it until I got a 1440p monitor and it wouldn't work with it because of some naming problem that was seemingly impossible to fix. No forum was able to help.

Don't get me started on the problems I had getting the A409U to work at 4k resolutions. It's frustrating. I'll tell you this: Arch Linux is your friend. It seems complex, but use the Antergos installer and install the proprietary drivers for whatever GPU you have and you'll be much better off. I only had a problem with mine because I tried for a few weeks to get the Open Source driver to work.

Wow, we're way off topic I guess. I don't wanna derail the thread, so if you want to get Linux working on your computer again, shoot me a PM or post in the linux helpdesk.

So does that mean free tons of custom scripts and general public use stuff? or paid mods?