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

Chapter 8: Working with WSL Distros

In Chapter 2, Installing and Configuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux, in the Introducing the wsl command section, we saw how we can use the wsl command to list the distributions (distros) that we have installed, run commands in them, and terminate them as needed.

We will revisit distros in this chapter, this time looking at them from more of a distro management perspective. In particular, we will look at how you can use the export and import commands to back up a distro or copy it to another machine. We will also look at how you can quickly create a new distro based on a Docker container image to enable you to easily create your own distros ready with any dependencies installed.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Exporting and importing a WSL distro
  • Creating and running a custom distro

We'll start the chapter by looking at how to export and import WSL distros.