UWIN is a UNIX to Windows Integration Toolkit that gives you almost all the features of a traditional UNIX operating system on Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows ME, and Windows 95/98.

We needed a UNIX layer to port the AST Toolkit to Windows so that applications using the AST toolkit would run on Windows platforms without the need to recode or to support multiple versions of the software. At the time we started UWIN, there were no alternatives. Now there are alternatives such as Cygwin and Unix System Services, but neither meet our needs as closely as UWIN does.

Version 4.0 is the latest version of UWIN.

Most of the POSIX library was created David Korn, author of the KornShell at AT&T Research. Portions of the code were developed under contract by Wipro, Ltd, in India. The AST Toolkit which provides most of the UNIX utilities are part of the AST Toolkit developed primarly by Glenn Fowler, David Korn, and Phong Vo of AT&T Research. A few of the utilities were built from GNU or BSD source code.

No, the same UWIN binaries should work with all versions of Windows.

Starting with release 4.0, most of UWIN base package is available under the CPL 1.0 license which is an Open Source License approved by the Open Source consortium. The vt100 emulator uses an MIT license, and a few utilities use BSD or GPL licenses. All of these are Open Source license. Earlier versions of UWIN had separate educational and commercial licenses.

The CPL license does not require you to make your source code available in order to use CPL software. The GPL license requires you to make source code available for any binaries that use GPL code. As long as you do not use any GPL code, you can use UWIN without making your source code available.

The primary reason for splitting into packages was to reduce the size for users that do not require everyting. For example, users that don't do software development do not need the development package. Not everyone requires the X11, groff, or perl software either. The license for these add-on packages might differ depending on where the sofware has been derived from. In addition, once the base package is installed, the installation of other packages can use standard UNIX tools for installing these additional packages.

UWIN Base package consists of the UWIN runtime libraries, shells, utilities, daemons and services. It provides a virtual UNIX environment on Windows. Most of the utilities were developed by AT&T and conform to POSIX.2 and X/Open. A few utilities were compiled from GNU and BSD source code.

UWIN Development package adds application development support on UWIN. It consists of header files, libraries and development utilities like cc, make, rcs, etc. It can be used to build UWIN applications and/or to build native applications. The UWIN Development package requires the UWIN base package to be installed on the system.

The X11 base package provides a number of X11 client applications as well as an X11 server. The X11 development package provides include files and libraries needed to build X11 applications. The perl package is a compilation of perl 5.8. The groff package is a compilation of the GNU groff utilities.

Currently UWIN is unsupported. However since UWIN is used internally at AT&T, we need to maintain it for internal use. By providing UWIN under an Open Source license, we are hoping that some organization(s) will provide support for UWIN.

There are two mailing groups for UWIN that you can use for this purpose as well as to get more UWIN information. The uwin-users@research.att.com group is more general, wherease the uwin-developers@research.att.com is for users that are developing applications that run under UWIN. In addition, problems that are related to the AST Toolkit, and not UWIN specific, can be posted on the ast mailing group. We are happy to receive bug fixes from users and will merge them into our base software.

Yes, the source code as a separate package. It requires the version 4.0 or later development kit to build UWIN. Some parts of UWIN require the Microsoft Visual C/C++ compiler to build. The compiler can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.

No. UWIN does not require POSIX subsystem. UWIN APIs are implemented using Win32 APIs and therefore interacts only with the WIN32 subsystem of Windows.

While UWIN contains nearly all of the X/Open 95 interaces, UWIN Version 4.0 has not been tested for X/Open Conformance.

UNIX permissions are handled on Windows NT/2000/XP only. The UNIX permissions are implemented in terms of the NT security permissions. Administrator has only some of the root privileges. Setuid and setgid programs can be created for a user provided that UCS for that user is installed.

Case distinction is not handled by default, but any part of the file system can be mounted as case sensitive both in Windows NT/XP and Windows 95/98 using loop back mounts. The performance of the system might be impacted somewhat and the names for some files might be different in UWIN than with the native system.

Yes, but they are not accessible outside UWIN. Hard links are supported for Windows NT/2000/XP and Windows 95/98 but are accessible outside UWIN only on Windows/NT NTFS file systems. Symlinks are accessible as shortcuts outside of UWIN.

Tape devices are supported for Windows NT/2000/XP only. You can use the tar command to create and restore tape archives.

Yes. The master pty is /usr/dev/ptym[0-9A-F] and the slave pty is /usr/dev/ptys[0-9A-F].

Yes, UWIN will work with the Samba file system but on some versions of Samba file permissions are not supported.

Yes, a number of features of the /proc file system are supported by UWIN.

The Windows Registry can be accessed as a virtual file system that is mounted at /reg from UWIN Keys that contain subkeys are directories. Without a trailing /, each registry key is a file whose contents are the value of this registry key.

No. UWIN does not provide binary level compatibility. But in most cases the UNIX code can be taken to UWIN and compiled to get a binary (.exe) working on Windows.

We haven't figured out how to get the UWIN shortcut code to cooperate with XP icons. C or C++ hints welcome. You can set the icon by right clicking the (blank) windows icon. XP even knows which one you want to set it to, so why doesn't it just do it?