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

Installing Linux distros in WSL

The standard way to install Linux distros for WSL is via the Microsoft Store. The full list of Linux distros currently available can be found in the official documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/wsl/install-win10#install-your-linux-distribution-of-choice). At the time of writing, this includes various versions of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE Leap, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Kali, Debian, Fedora Remix, Pengwin, and Alpine. Since we can't include examples for every version of Linux throughout the book, we will focus on using Ubuntu for our examples.

Tip

The steps from the previous chapter have installed all of the parts needed for running a version 2 distro in WSL, but version 1 is still the default!

These commands will be covered in the next section of the chapter, but if you want to make version 2 the default for any Linux distros you install then run the following command:

wsl --set-default-version 2

If you launch the Microsoft...