Interix is Microsoft's 'POSIX' (UNIX) subsystem that runs on 'Pro' and 'Server' versions of Windows 2k, XP, or Server 2003. In many ways, it is the 'best of both worlds', allowing you to have a fully functional UNIX shell and environment while running under a Microsoft Windows NT-based operating system. With the Interix system loaded, all of the 'standard' UNIX utilities are available to you, and it includes version 3.3 of the 'gcc' C/C++ compiler. In short, it's like having Linux or *BSD running on your Windows desktop, running as a POSIX sub-system, with 'csh' as the default shell, and 'vi' as the default editor (Windows users, be prepared to learn 'vi' commands. More on this later).
Conveniently, many MS-DOS and NT/2k/XP commands are identical to unix, namely 'cd', 'mkdir', 'rmdir', so the average Windows user that's familiar with 'cmd.exe' or 'command.com' should have no problem using Interix. As an extra added bonus, 'dir' works as you would expect it to under Interx, though within certain limits ('dir' can't resolve symbolic links). So you'll need to learn to use a few obvious UNIX commands, like 'ls', 'rm', 'cp', 'mv', 'ln', 'cat', and (most important) 'man'. Type 'man man' for information on 'man'. It's the UNIX version of the 'help' program that used to ship with MS-DOS.
With the obvious advantages, there are still some compatibility issues that I have discovered, which (interestingly enough) are very correctable. With a little bit of additional effort, you should be able to get your POSIX system running and be able to develop UNIX and Linux software, using the latest GCC compiler and tools, cross-compiling for whatever platform you deem necessary. It should even possible to do this from within Microsoft's visual development environment - with a little creative 'hacking', that is.
At the time of this writing, I'm working on re-building gcc version 3.3 (downloaded from
the GNU FTP site as a 'tar.gz' file) such that it functions as a cross-compiler for PalmOS.
Not surprisingly, utilities like 'gunzip' and 'tar' do exist under the 'Interix' subsystem,
though the 'tar' utility is really a wrapper for an application called 'pax'. So you should
get familiar with 'pax' when it's time to untar an archive.
As usual, you can use 'gunzip' to convert a '.tar.gz' file into a '.tar' file. Subsequently,
the command line to 'untar' an archive is quite simple:
to extract the archive 'tarfile.tar' from within the same directory. Typically, for a tarball named 'tarfile.tar' pax will create a directory 'tarfile' within the current directory, and extract the tarball tree into the new 'tarfile' directory (depending, of course, upon how the tarball itself was created). More on that, later.pax -r -f tarfile.tar
Another useful feature is the interaction between the windows file system and the interix
directory structure. Interix typically installs to a directory such as 'C:\SFU'. From
within this directory is the root structure of the entire POSIX environment (i.e. '/').
For referencing the windows structure from within the POSIX environment, it's slightly
more complicated - '/dev/fs/C' references the root directory of drive 'C', and the home
directory for a user is typically assigned to something similar to the following:
where 'username' is the user you logged in as (Administrator, joe, whatever). So there is no problem at all in integrating the file systems, running a windows application from within the POSIX shell, running a POSIX application from within the Windows environment. All of the necessary path translations are done on your behalf. Now, isn't that nice?/dev/fs/C/Documents And Settings/username
Conveniently, the '/net' directory is the Interix equivalent of
'Network Neighborhood', only better. Unfortunately, doing an 'ls' of
'/net' doesn't seem to give you anything useful, until after you've done an 'ls'
of something within '/net'. But doing an 'ls' of a machine name as a sub-directory,
or a wildard file name, such as
gives you a list of all of the SMB shares for the '\\ServerName' machine, as if they were sub-directories, AS WELL AS THE NFS SHARES. And if you specify a wildcard, such asls /net/ServerName
you'll get a list of machines as though they were sub-directories. Leaving out the '-d' will list the machines and all of their share names. And of course, you can access shares by referencing them with path names such asls -d /net/*
and so, unlike *nix systems that run SAMBA, there is no need to mount any devices to access the network, nor is there any need to mount an NFS share either. And now I see a need to offer the same kind of functionality from SAMBA...ls /net/ServerName/ShareName
However, if you install 'NFS Client', you'll have a few additional applications (some written for win32, some for POSIX) that allow you to do things like mount an NFS share to a drive letter (specifically 'mount.exe' and 'umount.exe'). This way you can access an NFS share from within Win32 applications. It does not seem possible to use something similar to a UNC path for NFS shares, however. So you're apparently stuck with using drive letters from Win32 when accessing NFS shares.
OK, now that I'm done playing MS Sycophant (in its own way, a potential self-referencing acronym like 'GNU') it's time to lay the bad news on you: there are compatibility issues with Interix that really really really need to be corrected.
The first of these issues is the 'make' utility, and the second is the 'grep' utility.
The 'make' utility exhibits errors when building certain projects, so replacing it with
the latest 'gnu' version is relatively important. And the 'grep' utility that ships with
Interix doesn't support all of the standard features you would expect from 'grep', namely
'-A' and '-r' functionality. And because of that, it breaks 'configure' if you try to build
'gcc'. None to worry, there is a solution: download 'make' and 'grep' from the GNU site and
build them yourself, then rename the original versions as 'oldmake' and 'oldgrep' and you're done.
Although I needed to update the 'config.guess' script to do get it to work (the GNU site
had a problem a while back and the latest 'config.guess' isn't available - boo!) the
modification was straightforward (more on this later) and you can do it yourself. It may even
be possible to use the 'config.guess' from 'make' for 'grep' if you download a new enough
version of 'make'. Be advised, if you edit any of these files with a Windows application,
POSIX (like UNIX) uses
When I downloaded the 'grep' utility (GNU utilities can be found at
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu),
I copied it into a directory I created for 'local implementation' source (as in UNIX):
This directory is a UNIX standard, representing the 'local implementation' source tree. It also causes the output files to be placed into '/usr/local/bin' when you do 'make install'. The 'grep' version I used had a package name grep-2.5.tar.gz, so I copied it into this path under the following name:/usr/local/src
Then of course, a series of commands to extract the files (please excuse the review for those who are already familiar, k?)/usr/local/src/grep-2.5.tar.gz
and the directory /usr/local/src/grep-2.5 gets created, containing all of the source for grep version 2.5 .cd /usr/local/src gunzip grep-2.5.tar.gz pax -r -f grep-2.5.tar
Building a new 'grep' is then relatively straightforward.
NOTE: if you receive any build errors, you might want to install the gnu 'make' first... also I had some trouble with the 'config.guess' that was included in the 'grep' source. For now, you too can download an unofficial 'fixed' version HERE, subject to the GPL of course. Or, you can borrow it from another project like 'make'.cd /usr/local/src/grep-2.5 ./configure make make install
Once you've successfully build 'grep', the 'make install' will conveniently place it into
the following location:
Because this is typically 'later on' in the path than the Interix utility '/bin/grep', you'll have to either modify your path (recommended), or else rename the Interix version to something else. To modify the path, you can edit '/etc/csh.login' and change the path line to read as follows:/usr/local/bin/grep
setenv PATH "/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/opt/gcc.3.3/bin:/usr/contrib/bin:${__x11_dir}/bin:/usr/contrib/win32/bin"
In my opinion, this is the better method. It forces the '/usr/local/bin' versions to run rather
than the '/usr/bin' versions whenever you install an updated tool (don't forget to use 'rehash'
after you build, so the shell knows which one to use).Once done, you will probably have to type in the command 'rehash' for the current session to recognize that it should run the new 'grep' utility. Then just type 'grep' and test it out, make sure it works, etc.mv /bin/grep /bin/oldgrep
Once you have updated 'grep' and 'make', there are a few additional GNU tools that could
make your life a lot easier, if you are a software developer. These are:
| m4 | UNIX macro processor | http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/ | |||
| autoconf | generate 'configure' scripts | http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/ | |||
| autogen | automatic code generation | http://www.gnu.org/software/autogen/ | |||
| automake | automatic make file generation | http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/ |
Now that you've updated 'grep' and 'make', you should be able to build 'GCC'. In my case, I downloaded version 3.3 because that version had already been installed. Mixing and matching versions of GCC is sometimes bad (you can experiment with your own system as you like, obviously) so I decided to keep the GCC version 'as-is'. The main reason I re-built it is to allow for cross-compilation, which requires building a new GCC from scratch, THEN configuring it to allow for cross-compiling. Obvious cross-compile options might include Linux, ELF (*BSD), and PalmOS. (for the truly brave, you might even try cross-compiling for OS/X, the latest version of which is derived from the FreeBSD 5.2.1 kernel, which uses ELF executables).
The GCC compiler that comes with Interix is installed in the following directory:
You should back this up before you begin. I copied mine to a directory '/opt/gcc.3.3.backup' using the following command:/opt/gcc.3.3
Following this, you can setup up a 'symbolic link' in the '/opt' directory that points to the old compiler as follows:cp -r /opt/gcc.3.3 /opt/gcc.3.3.backup
The first command renames the 'gcc.3.3' directory to 'gcc.3.3.old' (and now you realize that I really have TWO backups of the original - paranoia with respect to backups is never a bad thing). The second command creates a 'symbolic link' that points to the 'old' version of GCC. Once you have built a new 'GCC', you can delete the link and point it to the new one similar to this:mv /opt/gcc.3.3 /opt/gcc.3.3.old ln -s /opt/gcc.3.3.old /opt/gcc.3.3
This moves the symbolic link so that it points to the NEW GCC. In this way, if you experience problems, you can 'switch back and forth' as necessary to restore things back to the way they were when you first installed Interix, should the need arise. But it probably won't.rm /opt/gcc.3.3 ln -s /opt/gcc.3.3.new /opt/gcc.3.3
Configuration of the gcc compiler is NOT a simple thing. After spending some time reading
the manual, I came up with a relatively simple script to do this for me. First, to find out
how the original GCC was configured, I entered the following command:
The output indicates what all of the options should be. From this, I created the following script 'config.sh':gcc -v
NOTE: the 4th command is a single line of text, containing all of the options displayed by 'gcc -v' on my system.mkdir /usr/obj mkdir /usr/obj/gcc cd /usr/obj/gcc /opt/gcc-3.3/configure --prefix=/opt/gcc.3.3.new --verbose --disable-shared --with-stabs --enable-nls --with-local-prefix=/opt/gcc.3.3.new --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --enable-threads=posix --disable-cpp i586-pc-interix3
Following the configuration, of course, is the obgligatory 'make bootstrap' which in my case worked quite well. And then, of course, you configure all of the cross-compilers. Since I was building a cross-compiler using gcc Version 3.3, I was required to use a cross-compiler target of 'm86k-palmos-coff' rather than 'm68k-palmos' (which is what the PalmOS SDK wanted). So a little extra tweeking was in order, either with the PalmOS SDK or by creating some links 'after the fact' for backward compatibility. [I'll fire off some e-mails once I get it all working to let the appropriate people know... last I checked, ports for PalmOS SDK were broken in FreeBSD, possibly because of this.]
Next in the sequence of events, for a developer, is to get Automake, Autoconf, Autogen, and their related projects up and running. My experience with these is that I had to tweek them slightly to get everything to work, and of course you must build everything in the right order. You should of course make sure that you are using the gnu version of 'make' and 'grep' prior to doing this, and make sure that the 'm4' that you build and install will be the one that is found FIRST in the path.
It essentially works by substituting a forward slash for backslashes, removing the first colon, then prepending '/dev/fs/'. It demonstrates a nice generic way to convert a windows path into its Interix equivalent.setenv TEMP_ORIG "$TEMP" setenv TMP_ORIG "$TMP" setenv TEMP "/dev/fs/"`echo $TEMP | sed s\x\\\\x/xg | sed s/://` setenv TMP "/dev/fs/"`echo $TMP | sed s\x\\\\x/xg | sed s/://`
Quite obviously newer versions of these packages can be available at any time. The ones I used were downloaded some time ago, except for 'Autogen' and 'Guile'. I had to obtain a newer version of 'Autogen' since the one I downloaded before had too many build errors, and 'Guile' was a dependency for 'Autogen'.
All of the *nix-based systems that I have seen include an application 'man' that displays 'manual pages'. When you install a new application, you typically install the manual pages along with it. Unfortunately, the Interix man page does not have the 'groff' utility, and so many man pages do not display properly.
There is also another problem: The directories used by Interix (by default) are the 'cat#' directories, and not 'man#' directories. So the directory tree for manual pages looks something like this:
and so on. However, the GNU tools all expect the 'cat#' diretories to be 'man#' directories. Since the autotools want to install a man page to the corresponding 'man#' directories, you should rectify this problem by executing the following commands:/usr/share/man/cat1 /usr/share/man/cat1w /usr/share/man/cat2 /usr/share/man/cat3 ... /usr/local/man/cat1 /usr/local/man/cat2 /usr/local/man/cat3
and so forth. Typically only man1 and man3 will be used by things such as the GNU tools, and applications will typically only use 'man1'. Creating these symbolic links will guarantee that new applications will install their man pages in a usable location.ln -s /usr/local/man/man1 /usr/local/man/cat1 ln -s /usr/local/man/man2 /usr/local/man/cat2 ln -s /usr/local/man/man3 /usr/local/man/cat3
Additionally, you might want to add '/usr/local/man' to your "man path". To do this, you can edit '/etc/csh.local' and add (or modify) the MANPATH assignment as follows:
Additionally you could modify the MANPATH assignment in /etc/csh.login or /etc/profilesetenv MANPATH "/usr/local/man:$MANPATH"
export MANPATH="/usr/local/man:/usr/share/man:${__X11}/man:/usr/X11R5/man"
These assignments cause the 'man' application to FIRST look in the 'local' man directory,
and then look in the standard man directories, when searching for man pages.
I wrote an application called 'crlf' that converts <LF> to <CR><LF>, and vice versa. Since Interix conforms with the *nix standard of terminating lines with a single <LF> character, and Windows editors like 'notepad' choke on that, you may find that you need to convert between these two formats easily.
To install the 'crlf' utility, you must first download the
source tarball, and save
this file as
Then, execute the following commands/usr/local/src/crlf-1.01.tar.gz
This will install the 'crlf' utility on your computer. For information on usage, you can type 'man crlf' (assuming you made the changes to the '/usr/local/man' directory and your 'MANPATH', as recommended in the previous section).cd /usr/local/src gunzip crlf-1.01.tar.gz pax -r -f crlf-1.01.tar cd crlf-1.01 ./configure make install
The hardest part about 'vi' is learning to use it. To avoid some rather frustrating experiences,
I've put together a simple set of command examples.
To run 'vi'
vi [filename]
where '[filename]' is the optional file that you want to edit.
Once in 'vi', you can navigate using the arrow, page up, and page down keys. Keys like 'home'
'end' and 'delete' may not function as you expect, so don't use them unless you can configure
'vi' ahead of time to use them properly. Instead, you can use the navigation keys documented
by entering the following command:
:viusage
The ':' begins 'command entry' mode, and 'viusage' allows you to see what commands are
available to you. ':help' also works, by the way.
To exit 'vi' without saving any changes, use the following command:
:q!
To exit 'vi' and save your changes, use the following command:
:wq
- or -
ZZ (no preceding ':' in this case)
(the ':w' command by itself writes the file, so you can use it to save while you work)
One of the first things you'll probably notice in 'vi' is that when you start typing, weird
things happen. This is because you're not in 'insert' mode. Switching in and out of insert
mode is relatively easy. While in 'insert' mode, pressing 'enter' will start a new line or
insert a linefeed at the cursor. To enter 'insert' mode, press the lower case 'i'. Then you
can insert keystrokes at the cursor. Arrow keys still function in this mode, as well as the
backspace key (which will delete characters, but not line feeds). To exit from 'insert' mode,
press the 'Esc' key once.
To delete the character under the cursor, press the lower case 'x' key.
To 'join' two lines, press the upper case 'J' key. This is the only obvious way to delete
a line feed.
To get to the beginning of a line, press the '0' (zero) key.
To delete from the cursor to the end of a line, press the upper case 'D' key. You'll also
need to press the upper case 'J' if you want to delete the LF also. So the sequence to delete
a line would be '0DJ'
To search for something, press '/' (which enters 'command mode') followed by the text
you want to search for, and
Other keys are documented by entering ':viusage'. Hopefully these 'hints' will get you
started with 'vi' without too much trouble. You may find it to be a useful editor, or you
may find it cumbersome (as I do), but at least you'll know how to use 'vi', which is a
standard on UNIX and Linux systems.
Microsoft Interix' web site (free download)
GNU Software Download FTP site (also available via HTTP)
GCC Official Web Site