Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is a package which provides a Unix compliant environment on Microsoft Windows computers. It provides both a subsystem, named Interix and a set of tools. Microsoft does not intend to produce any further versions of the product and plans to discontinue support for it [1] because it is being integrated as part of the regular OS distribution[2].
Interix is not an emulation of a Unix kernel, but rather an implementation of an environment subsystem running within the Windows kernel. This improves performance compared with the emulation used by Cygwin.
SFU contains:
- Over 350 Unix utilities such as vi, ksh, csh, ls, cat, awk, grep, etc.
- GCC 3.3 compiler, includes and libraries
- A cc-like wrapper for Microsoft Visual Studio command-line C/C++ compiler
- GDB debugger
- NFS server and client
- A pcnfsd daemon
- X Windows tools and libraries
- Tools for making NFS mountpoints appear as Windows shares, and vice-versa (gateway services)
- An NIS server capability linked with Active Directory (AD)
- Some Windows/Unix authentication information synchronization tools
SFU does not contain (but binaries are available for a separate installation[3]):
- bash, OpenSSH, sudo, CVS, ClamAV, bzip2, gmake, curl, emacs, Apache, XView, ruby, Tcl, Python
Although X Windows client libraries and applications are provided, SFU does not contain a native X server. A number of third party X servers can be used including WRQ's Reflection X or Hummingbird's Exceed. In addition, StarNet provides a free Win32 X Server designed specifically for local X applications on Windows. Several free software X11 Server implementations are available from X/Cygwin, Xming and X-Deep/32.
Released versions
Current release is version 3.5 on January, 2004. Next scheduled release is version 5.2 on December, 2005 (for Windows 2003 Server Release 2, aka W2K3/R2, only). Previous version 3.0 released 2002.