Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By : Stuart Leeks
Book Image

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

By: Stuart Leeks

Overview of this book

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows you to run native Linux tools alongside traditional Windows applications. Whether you’re developing applications across multiple operating systems or looking to add more tools to your Windows environment, WSL offers endless possibilities. You’ll start by understanding what WSL is and learn how to install and configure WSL along with different Linux distros. Next, you'll learn techniques that allow you to work across both Windows and Linux environments. You’ll discover how to install and customize the new Windows Terminal. We'll also show you how to work with code in WSL using Visual Studio Code (VS Code). In addition to this, you’ll explore how to work with containers with Docker and Kubernetes, and how to containerize a development environment using VS Code. While Microsoft has announced support for GPU and GUI applications in an upcoming release of WSL, at the time of writing these features are either not available or only in early preview releases. This book focuses on the stable, released features of WSL and giving you a solid understanding of the amazing techniques that you can use with WSL today. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to configure WSL and Windows Terminal to suit your preferences, and productively use Visual Studio Code for developing applications with WSL.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction, Installation, and Configuration
5
Section 2:Windows and Linux – A Winning Combination
11
Section 3: Developing with the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Summary

In this chapter, you have seen how to access files in the Windows file system from WSL distributions, and how to launch Windows applications from Linux, including using the wlsview utility to easily launch the default Windows application for a file. You've learned how to pipe input between Windows and Linux scripts, including how to map paths between the two file system schemes using wslpath when required.

At the end of the chapter, you saw how to map from Linux sockets to Windows-named pipes, and used this technique to make your Windows SSH keys available in WSL. This allows you to avoid copying your SSH keys into each WSL distribution and instead manage your SSH keys and passphrases in a single, shared place, making it easier to control and back up your SSH keys.

All of this helps to bring Windows and Linux closer together with WSL and to drive greater productivity in your daily workflows.

We've spent quite a lot of time in the terminal in this chapter...