Vista's UNIX Compatability

[DudeMiester]

Application compatibility

Windows Vista Enterprise includes built-in tools to improve application compatibility with previous versions of Microsoft operating systems, as well as with UNIX operating systems. A feature of Windows Vista Enterprise, Virtual PC Express enables you to run—unchanged—a legacy application on a legacy Windows operating system in a virtual environment on top of Windows Vista Enterprise. This feature saves you time and money if you are unable to easily migrate a legacy application directly to Windows Vista.

Additionally, Windows Vista Enterprise includes Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA), which enables you to run UNIX applications unchanged on a Windows Vista Enterprise-based PC. Whereas today a UNIX database administrator or system administrator needs to have a UNIX workstation in addition to a Windows-based PC, Windows Vista Enterprise enables you to consolidate both functions into a single Windows Vista-based PC.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/enterprise.mspx

If you're running the Vista beta, you can install this via Control Panel->Programs->Add/Remove Windows Components. It's near the bottom.

Also, you can get a bunch of utilities for it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...01-325e-487f-a398-efde5758c47f&DisplayLang=en

Now, I don't have any UNIX/Linux type apps to try this with, but from my primitive understanding this feature adds POSIX compliance and other things to Vista. I'm curious to how well it works, and was wondering if anyone has played around with this. What are your experiances?

PS: Anyone else been finding MSDN really flaky these days?