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 Window 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 Window 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.
Windows 2003 Server Release 2, to be released in December 2005, contains some SFU components, namely Microsoft Services for Network File System (NFS), Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications, and Identity Management for UNIX. [4]
Previous version 3.0 released 2002.