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

Preface

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is an exciting technology from Microsoft that brings Linux side by side with Windows and allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries on Windows. Unlike the experience of running Linux in an isolated virtual machine, WSL brings rich interoperability capabilities that allow you to bring tools from each operating system together, allowing you to use the best tool for the job.

With WSL 2, Microsoft has advanced WSL by improving performance and giving full system call compatibility to give you even more capabilities when leveraging the feature. Additionally, other technologies, such as Docker Desktop and Visual Studio Code, have added support for WSL, adding more ways to take advantage of it.

With Docker Desktop's WSL integration, you can run the Docker daemon in WSL, offering a range of benefits including improved performance when mounting volumes from WSL.

The WSL integration in Visual Studio Code enables you to install your project tools and dependencies in WSL along with your source code and have the Windows user interface connect to WSL to load your code and to run and debug your application in WSL.

All in all, WSL is an exciting technology that has made a huge improvement to my daily workflow and I hope to share that excitement with you as you read this book!