Interix

Interix is the name of an optional, full-featured POSIX and Unix environment subsystem for Microsoft's Windows NT-based operating systems. It is a component of the Services for Unix (SFU) release 3.0 and 3.5 (this last one is distributed free). The most recent releases of Interix, 5.2 and 6.0, are components of the Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions under the name SUA ^[1] (Subsystem for Unix-based Applications).[2]Like the Microsoft POSIX subsystem in Windows NT, Interix is an implementation of an environment subsystem running atop the Windows kernel. Interix provides numerous open source utilities, much like the cygwin project.

The complete installation of Interix includes:

• Over 350 Unix utilities such as vi, ksh, csh, ls, cat, awk, grep, kill, etc.
• A complete set of manual pages for utilities and API's
• GCC 3.3 compiler, includes and libraries
• A cc/c89-like wrapper for Microsoft Visual Studio command-line C/C++ compiler
• GNU Debugger
• X11 client applications and libraries (no X server included though)
• Has Unix "root" capabilities (i.e. setuid files)
• Supports pthreads, shared libraries, DSO's, job control, signals, sockets, shared memory

The development environment includes support for C, C++ and Fortran. Threading is supported using the Pthreads model. Additional languages can be obtained (Python, Ruby, Tcl, etc.). The pkgsrc software packaging/build system was ported to work with Interix 3.5, and may work with newer versions (not yet tested).

Starting with release 5.2 the following capabilities were added:^[3]

• "Mixed mode" for linking Unix programs with Windows DLLs
• 64-bit CPU support (in addition to 32-bit)
• Large file system support on 64-bit systems
• System V utilities can be optionally installed instead of the default BSD-based utilities

With release 6.0 the following new features can be expected:

• IPv6 support
• Updates to utilities are planned
• MSVC debugging plug-in

Also Interix is slated to be included only with Vista Ultimate and Enterprise (not other Vista editions) from the next version onwards.