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Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

I'm using it on my tablet instead of previously using a VMWare image and msys+mingw+cygwin.

The main advantage over a VM is no resource partitioning: on a 4GB RAM tablet with 64GB eMMC, you can't allocate more than 2GB RAM to a VM without trouble, and putting 20GB of disk aside for it is also a pain., and much improved power efficiency (even an idle VM drastically reduces battery life, while Ubuntu for Windows doesn't).

Compared to Cygwin: a lot more packages are available, a lot more just works out of the box, and you can painlessly use online tutorials for Linux, which often assume Ubuntu and don't consider Cygwin a target platform.

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since you are already up and running may I ask what friends have been asking me? Can you apt-get install zsh ?

Ask away. I don't have the tablet with me, but I can answer what I know so far.

I haven't tried zsh, but I'm pretty sure you can install it. I installed a bunch of applications, including using third party repos and ppa's. I don't see why zsh would not work.

Perhaps zsh uses some unsupported escape sequences (for instance, screen doesn't seem to work), but you can readily work around that by using another terminal in windows (mintty) or launching a VNC server from Linux and a VNC client to your localhost I assume.

The reason that zsh gives the errors reported earlier in this sub-thread will be different to the reason that screen doesn't work.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417227

It's readily apparent from the error messages earlier in this sub-thread that the zsh problem isn't to do with escape sequences. And of course the screen problem (at least the one known so far) is not escape sequences, either.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416392

Doesn't look like zsh is fully working yet:

root@localhost:~# zsh compaudit:105: wait failed: invalid argument compdef:95: wait failed: invalid argument localhost# exit zsh: you have running jobs. localhost#

Will have to try again after the next build.

Have you tried it in another terminal emulator (like mintty) or an X session (using a X running on Windows or a VNC X server)?

I couldn't get zsh to work (same errors as tallanvor) but other shells did work, like fish with oh-my-fish. I had to run bash in ConEmu to be able to display some unicode characters (those used by powerline themes/fonts) - http://i.imgur.com/JT8Zi5j.png

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