One of the new features in Windows 10 is the Bash shell. More accurately, “Bash on Ubuntu on
Windows”. I have seen mixed opinions
about whether this is a good thing or not.
However, I think it is without a doubt a significant improvement for
server side developers. Previously, I
would have only used XUbuntu or OSX for server side development for both the seamlessness
of ssh connections and support for various tools (such as command line Git). Now, doing this on Windows is a reasonable
option.
In the not very distant past, I was working on a team doing
some Node.js development on Ubuntu. Part
of the group was inexperienced on several of the key tools, including Git. They were also the part using Windows for
this development. This led to using the
Git graphical interface on Windows, which compounded the lack of understanding
what was going on under the hood in Git and ultimately led to some problems. A regular “UNIX style” command line would have
gone a long way to ameliorating this situation and bringing them up to speed.
Back in the present, installation of the Ubuntu subsystem was
pretty straightforward. There are
various pages found easily enough that explain what to do. During the installation, it asks you for a
UNIX username and password. I had seen
one installation instruction page that said this was root account, but I think
they just misused the term. It is a
regular account with sudo privileges, just like a standard Ubuntu installation.
From a version standpoint, ‘lsb_release –a’ reveals it is “Ubuntu
14.04.4 LTS” with ‘uname –a’ giving the kernel release at 3.4.0+ . That seems pretty reasonable considering 1) when
this subsystem first came out for Windows and 2) Ubuntu 14.04.4 was out in February
2016 while 14.04.5 was out in August 2016 according to the release schedule
here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseSchedule .
In gathering information from the Bash window, I noticed
that the copy and paste facility is a bit clunky. Selecting text for copying only works if the
window is put into what appears to be “Mark” mode by using the right-click popup
menu. This appears to be the same as how
it works in a standard Windows command line window. The paste mechanism works ok from the popup
menu, but ctrl/v does not work, although in a standard Windows command line the
ctrl/v key combination does work correctly.
Starting with Git:
I did an apt-get install git from a root shell which went
entirely as expected. The version that
installed was 1.9.1. Since the version
that just installed on a machine running XUbuntu 16.04 LTS was 2.7.4, it is of
course not the most current. However, it is the version you would expect to
appear on 14.04.4. It is the same
version that apt-get tells me is the newest version on a machine running XUbuntu
14.04.5. Anyway, cloning a repository onto
the Bash subsystem went as expected.
Follow on thoughts: How well
will this work as a server?
