Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers

Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows

See also Scott Hanselman's blog here

I'm in San Francisco this week, attending Microsoft's Build developer conference, as a sponsored guest of Microsoft.

That's perhaps a bit odd for me, as I hadn't used Windows in nearly 16 years.  But that changed a few months ago, as I embarked on a super secret (and totally mind boggling!) project between Microsoft and Canonical, as unveiled today in a demo during Kevin Gallo's opening keynote of the Build conference....

An Ubuntu user space and bash shell, running natively in a Windows 10 cmd.exe console!

Did you get that?!?  Don't worry, it took me a few laps around that track, before I fully comprehended it when I first heard such crazy talk a few months ago :-)

Here's let's break it down slowly...

1. Windows 10 users
2. Can open the Windows Start menu
3. And type "bash" [enter]
4. Which opens a cmd.exe console
5. Running Ubuntu's /bin/bash
6. With full access to all of Ubuntu user space
7. Yes, that means apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch...
8. And most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives!

"Right, so just Ubuntu running in a virtual machine?"  Nope!  This isn't a virtual machine at all.  There's no Linux kernel booting in a VM under a hypervisor.  It's just the Ubuntu user space.

"Ah, okay, so this is Ubuntu in a container then?"  Nope!  This isn't a container either.  It's native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows.

"Hum, well it's like cygwin perhaps?"  Nope!  Cygwin includes open source utilities are recompiled from source to run natively in Windows.  Here, we're talking about bit-for-bit, checksum-for-checksum Ubuntu ELF binaries running directly in Windows.

[long pause]

"So maybe something like a Linux emulator?"  Now you're getting warmer!  A team of sharp developers at Microsoft has been hard at work adapting some Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls.  Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows.  Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux".  (No, it's not open source at this time.)

Oh, and it's totally shit hot!  The sysbench utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance.

So as part of the engineering work, I needed to wrap the stock Ubuntu root filesystem into a Windows application package (.appx) file for suitable upload to the Windows Store.  That required me to use Microsoft Visual Studio to clone a sample application, edit a few dozen XML files, create a bunch of icon .png's of various sizes, and so on.

Not being Windows developer, I struggled and fought with Visual Studio on this Windows desktop for a few hours, until I was about ready to smash my coffee mug through the damn screen!

Instead, I pressed the Windows key, typed "bash", hit enter.  Then I found the sample application directory in /mnt/c/Users/Kirkland/Downloads, and copied it using "cp -a".  I used find | xargs | rename to update a bunch of filenames.  And a quick grep | xargs | sed to comprehensively search and replace s/SampleApp/UbuntuOnWindows/. And Ubuntu's convert utility quickly resized a bunch of icons.   Then I let Visual Studio do its thing, compiling the package and uploading to the Windows Store.  Voila!

Did you catch that bit about /mnt/c...  That's pretty cool...  All of your Windows drives, like C: are mounted read/write directly under /mnt.  And, vice versa, you can see all of your Ubuntu filesystem from Windows Explorer in C:\Users\Kirkland\AppData\Local\Lxss\rootfs\

Meanwhile, I also needed to ssh over to some of my other Ubuntu systems to get some work done.  No need for Putty!  Just ssh directly from within the Ubuntu shell.

Of course apt install and upgrade as expected.

Is everything working exactly as expected?  No, not quite.  Not yet, at least.  The vast majority of the LTP passes and works well.  But there are some imperfections still, especially around tty's an the vt100.  My beloved byobu, screen, and tmux don't quite work yet, but they're getting close!

And while the current image is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, we're expecting to see Ubuntu 16.04 LTS replacing Ubuntu 14.04 in the Windows Store very, very soon.

Finally, I imagine some of you -- long time Windows and Ubuntu users alike -- are still wondering, perhaps, "Why?!?"  Having dedicated most of the past two decades of my career to free and open source software, this is an almost surreal endorsement by Microsoft on the importance of open source to developers.  Indeed, what a fantastic opportunity to bridge the world of free and open source technology directly into any Windows 10 desktop on the planet.  And what a wonderful vector into learning and using more Ubuntu and Linux in public clouds like Azure.  From Microsoft's perspective, a variety of surveys and user studies have pointed to bash and Linux tools -- very specifically, Ubuntu -- be available in Windows, and without resource-heavy full virtualization.

So if you're a Windows Insider and have access to the early beta of this technology, we certainly hope you'll try it out!  Let us know what you think!

If you want to hear more, hopefully you'll tune into the Channel 9 Panel discussion at 16:30 PDT on March 30, 2016.

Cheers,
Dustin

Appellation of Origin: FROM ubuntu

tl;dr:  Your Ubuntu-based container is not a copyright violation.  Nothing to see here.  Carry on.

I am speaking for my employer, Canonical, when I say you are not violating our policies if you use Ubuntu with Docker in sensible, secure ways.  Some have claimed otherwise, but that’s simply sensationalist and untrue.

Canonical publishes Ubuntu images for Docker specifically so that they will be useful to people. You are encouraged to use them! We see no conflict between our policies and the common sense use of Docker.

Going further, we distribute Ubuntu in many different signed formats -- ISOs, root tarballs, VMDKs, AMIs, IMGs, Docker images, among others.  We take great pride in this work, and provide them to the world at large, on ubuntu.com, in public clouds like AWS, GCE, and Azure, as well as in OpenStack and on DockerHub.  These images, and their signatures, are mirrored by hundreds of organizations all around the world. We would not publish Ubuntu in the DockerHub if we didn’t hope it would be useful to people using the DockerHub. We’re delighted for you to use them in your public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal deployments.

Any Docker user will recognize these, as the majority of all Dockerfiles start with these two words....

FROM ubuntu

In fact, we gave away hundreds of these t-shirts at DockerCon.

We explicitly encourage distribution and redistribution of Ubuntu images and packages! We also embrace a very wide range of community remixes and modifications. We go further than any other commercially supported Linux vendor to support developers and community members scratching their itches. There are dozens of such derivatives and many more commercial initiatives based on Ubuntu - we are definitely not trying to create friction for people who want to get stuff done with Ubuntu.

Our policy exists to ensure that when you receive something that claims to be Ubuntu, you can trust that it will work to the same standard, regardless of where you got it from. And people everywhere tell us they appreciate that - when they get Ubuntu on a cloud or as a VM, it works, and they can trust it.  That concept is actually hundreds of years old, and we’ll talk more about that in a minute....

So, what do I mean by “sensible use” of Docker? In short - secure use of Docker. If you are using a Docker container then you are effectively giving the producer of that container ‘root’ on your host. We can safely assume that people sharing an Ubuntu docker based container know and trust one another, and their use of Ubuntu is explicitly covered as personal use in our policy. If you trust someone to give you a Docker container and have root on your system, then you can handle the risk that they inadvertently or deliberately compromise the integrity or reliability of your system.

Our policy distinguishes between personal use, which we can generalise to any group of collaborators who share root passwords, and third party redistribution, which is what people do when they exchange OS images with strangers.

Third party redistribution is more complicated because, when things go wrong, there’s a real question as to who is responsible for it. Here’s a real example: a school district buys laptops for all their students with free software. A local supplier takes their preferred Linux distribution and modifies parts of it (like the kernel) to work on their hardware, and sells them all the PCs. A month later, a distro kernel update breaks all the school laptops. In this case, the Linux distro who was not involved gets all the bad headlines, and the free software advocates who promoted the whole idea end up with egg on their faces.

We’ve seen such cases in real hardware, and in public clouds and other, similar environments.  Digital Ocean very famously published some modified and very broken Ubuntu images, outside of Canonical's policies.  That's inherently wrong, and easily avoidable.

So we simply say, if you’re going to redistribute Ubuntu to third parties who are trusting both you and Ubuntu to get it right, come and talk to Canonical and we’ll work out how to ensure everybody gets what they want and need.

Here’s a real exercise I hope you’ll try...

1. Head over to your local purveyor of fine wines and liquors.
2. Pick up a nice bottle of Champagne, Single Malt Scotch Whisky, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, or my favorite -- a rare bottle of Lambic Oude Gueze.
3. Carefully check the label, looking for a seal of Appellation d'origine contrôlée.
4. In doing so, that bottle should earn your confidence that it was produced according to strict quality, format, and geographic standards.
5. Before you pop the cork, check the seal, to ensure it hasn’t been opened or tampered with.  Now, drink it however you like.
6. Pour that Champagne over orange juice (if you must).  Toss a couple ice cubes in your Scotch (if that’s really how you like it).  Pour that Bourbon over a Coke (if that’s what you want).
7. Enjoy however you like -- straight up or mixed to taste -- with your own guests in the privacy of your home.  Just please don’t pour those concoctions back into the bottle, shove a cork in, put them back on the shelf at your local liquor store and try to pass them off as Champagne/Scotch/Bourbon.

Rather, if that’s really what you want to do -- distribute a modified version of Ubuntu -- simply contact us and ask us first (thanks for sharing that link, mjg59).  We have some amazing tools that can help you either avoid that situation entirely, or at least let’s do everyone a service and let us help you do it well.

Believe it or not, we’re really quite reasonable people!  Canonical has a lengthy, public track record, donating infrastructure and resources to many derivative Ubuntu distributions.  Moreover, we’ve successfully contracted mutually beneficial distribution agreements with numerous organizations and enterprises. The result is happy users and happy companies.

FROM ubuntu,
Dustin

The one and only Champagne region of France

snappy vs.apt-get Ubuntu Matrix

With the recent introduction of Snappy Ubuntu, there are now several different ways to extend and update (apt-get vs. snappy) multiple flavors of Ubuntu (Core, Desktop, and Server).

We've put together this matrix with a few examples of where we think Traditional Ubuntu (apt-get) and Transactional Ubuntu (snappy) might make sense in your environment.  Note that this is, of course, not a comprehensive list.

	Ubuntu Core	Ubuntu Desktop	Ubuntu Server
Traditional apt-get	Minimal Docker and LXC images	Desktop, Laptop, Personal Workstations	Baremetal, MAAS, OpenStack, General Purpose Cloud Images
Transactional snappy	Minimal IoT Devices and Micro-Services Architecture Cloud Images	Touch, Phones, Tablets	Comfy, Human Developer Interaction (over SSH) in an atomically updated environment

I've presupposed a few of the questions you might ask, while you're digesting this new landscape...

Q: I'm looking for the smallest possible Ubuntu image that still supports apt-get...

A: You want our Traditional Ubuntu Core. This is often useful in building Docker and LXC containers.

Q: I'm building the next wearable IoT device/drone/robot, and perhaps deploying a fleet of atomically updated micro-services to the cloud...

A: You want Snappy Ubuntu Core.

Q: I want to install the best damn Linux on my laptop, desktop, or personal workstation, with industry best security practices, 30K+ freely available open source packages, freely available, with extensive support for hardware devices and proprietary add-ons...

A: You want the same Ubuntu Desktop that we've been shipping for 10+ years, on time, every time ;-)

Q: I want that same converged, tasteful Ubuntu experience on your personal, smart devices like my Phones and Tablets...

A: You want Ubuntu Touch, which is a very graphical human interface focused expression of Snappy Ubuntu.

Q: I'm deploying Linux onto bare metal servers at scale in the data center, perhaps building IaaS clouds using OpenStack or PaaS cloud using CloudFoundry? And I'm launching general purpose Linux server instances in public clouds (like AWS, Azure, or GCE) and private clouds...

A: You want the traditional apt-get Ubuntu Server.

Q: I'm developing and debugging applications, services, or frameworks for Snappy Ubuntu devices or cloud instances?

A: You want Comfy Ubuntu Server, which is a command line human interface extension of Snappy Ubuntu, with a number of conveniences and amenities (ssh, byobu, manpages, editors, etc.) that won't be typically included in the minimal Snappy Ubuntu Core build. [*Note that the Comfy images will be available very soon]

Cheers,
:-Dustin