Losing his cables

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:13

Jon Honeyball changes allegiance by cashing in the beloved PC for a Mac! No, he hasn't lost his mind - only his cable. He also attempts to get some order out of Windows 2000

My real worry with this program, though, is that it might make people lazy. Most multimedia computers nowadays are shipped without any means for doing any sort of backup at all, and so disaster recovery is limited to 'asking a friend who might help'. GoBack gives you this sense that you can roll back your changes to whenever you like, even taking a whole machine back to a state before you installed some particular software, but this won't help a bit when you have a hard disk crash, or if GoBack should decide that it can't deliver. A proper backup regime onto some other external storage medium is far more sensible in the long term, even if it's considerably less sexy. So I ought to give this technology a cautious recommendation - I'm concerned about its disk thrashing during large file manipulations, and the false sense of security it might induce, but by all means try it and see what you think.

Interix

Most people forget that NT and Windows 2000 are basically modular operating systems, which still have the long-forgotten 16-bit OS/2 character mode subsystem in there, for example. And when was the last time you used the POSIX subsystem either? Well, if you're a Unix-head, then the POSIX system is a bit of bad joke really, which Microsoft only put in because at the time there was a plan for POSIX to become a useful environment. However, Microsoft never really pushed the implementation through.

Various companies have produced a range of plug-in shells for the environment, and now it's Microsoft's turn with Interix 2.2 - though I'm not entirely convinced that this really is Microsoft's own work, as there's little mention of the product on Microsoft's Web site, and since when did Microsoft use PDF format for product documentation? Given that the original name for Interix was 'OpenNT', it suggests to me a third-party product, and I wonder if there's an element of rebadging and repositioning going on here. A few mouse clicks later and there we have it - OpenNT was a product from Software Systems and Microsoft acquired it in September 1999.

Interix is, nevertheless, an interesting enough platform, which when installed upgrades the POSIX subsystem on your NT 4 or Windows 2000 machine into a useful Unix-like operating system. The basic premise behind Interix is that you might want to port applications developed for Unix-based open systems onto the NT platform, and so you get a complete run-time environment for NT that includes all the popular Unix shells and tools. The SDK contains a set of development tools for directly porting open systems applications to NT, and its feature list is long and looks pretty complete, though the lack of an X11 server might be seen as a limitation by many. In addition to the KornShell, C Shell and Bourne Shell, it offers BSD sockets mapped through to WinSock, memory-mapped files, SVID IPC mechanisms (semaphores, message queues and shared memory) pseudo-terminal support and colour curses support.

There's full integration with the NT security model and file systems, more than 300 utilities including scripting tools like awk, sed and perl, X clients such as xterm, twm, xrdb, and xlsclients and support for running X Windows applications on remote displays. Unix daemons can be run as NT services. Not being a Unix hacker, I'm clearly not the right person to comment on the goodness or otherwise of this set of tools, but I'd guess that this kit falls into the 'if you need it, you need it bad' category, so a specific recommendation wouldn't be very sensible. What I'm pointing out here is that it exists, and that anything that induces Microsoft software to work with non-Microsoft platforms should be considered a good thing in its own right. Find out more information at www.interix.com

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