Windows is getting support for browsing Linux file systems! Except, not really, since it only applies to WSL.
We’ve had the ability to access your Linux files since Windows 1903, but now you can easily get to them from your left-hand navigation pane in File Explorer. Selecting the Linux icon will show you a view of all your distros, and selecting those will place you in the Linux root file system for that distro.
As far as I can tell, this only applies to distributions installed through Windows Subsystems for Linux, not to actual distributions installed elsewhere on your computer (on other hard drives or partitions). Cool new feature, I guess, but properly sanctioned Windows support for Ext4 and other Linux-focused file systems would be so much more helpful.
Yeah, the thing is windows not only needs ext4 support but also LVM support for it to be very useful to me. Backing up without LVM/ BTRFS/ZFS is a pain I haven’t used a bare ext4 in years.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
+1
This is something I’ve wanted for years!
This is actually nothing new, except for the UI change. It used to be under %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages with an encoded name. https://www.howtogeek.com/261383/how-to-access-your-ubuntu-bash-files-in-windows-and-your-windows-system-drive-in-bash/. And initially they did not want you to modify Linux files inside Windows.
Now things are more stable, and they are adding a link at the top level navigation sidebar.
Not quite. Firstly, modifying Linux files through Windows could damage the Linux installation. This is because NTFS file model (stuff like permissions) is not fully compatible with Linux, so hacks had to be put in place.
Secondly, this new feature is mostly about WSL2. WSL2 runs real, though heavily customized, build of the Linux kernel in a lightweight VM. It uses an image of an EXT4 partition for the rootfs. To access it, Windows automatically sets up a file server in Linux and integrates the client with Explorer.
drstorm,
I may get some flak for saying this, but when I was primarily a windows administrator learning linux, the unix/linux file permission model was one of my disappointments. Sure, technically linux has added support for access control lists, but it felt tacked on as an afterthought and was not sufficiently supported by tooling. Some programs assume the use of ugo+rwx rather than ACL. In terms of file permissions, IMHO window nt started from a better origin. Of course it came much later than unix, so it’s not exactly fair, but we’re still dealing with these bits on linux all these years later.
Having done a fair bit of both, in practice Windows permissions work the same way – you have a bunch of AD groups, assign users to as many groups as necessary, and grant permissions based on those groups or to a single user… so it maps cleanly to ugo+rwx. All the “special” permissions bits NT has invariably caused problems, because they were the result of admins getting overly cute and doing things that didn’t map cleanly to Group Policies.
tidux
If you have ugo+rwx, you can always implement the same permissions using ACL, but visa versa ugo+rwx is less expressive than ACL. Multiple groups are problematic under traditional unix permissions. For example, if you want different groups to have access to a set of files, say one group having r/w access and the other only have read only access, windows NT always supported this, but traditional unix permission bits could not.
I don’t know, I don’t think I ever needed “special” permission bits as a windows admin,
I haven’t seen any news about WSL2 supporting raw block device access. I will still need to stick to Cygwin for dd of ISOs to USB flash drives.
Thank you, OSAlert
For an insightful and well-written article! I can’t wait for this information to be taken and added to my site! I have to say that this is a very informative post.
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