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 Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is (at the time of writing) still being actively worked on, and it lives on GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft/terminal. If you want to run the absolute latest code (or are interested in contributing features), then the docs on GitHub will take you through the steps needed to build the code. (The GitHub repo is also a great place to raise issues and feature requests.)

The more common way to install Windows Terminal is via the Windows Store, which will install the application and give you an easy way to keep it updated. You can either search for Windows Terminal in the Store app (as shown in the following figure) or use the quick link at https://aka.ms/terminal:

Figure 3.4 – A screenshot of the Windows Store app showing Windows Terminal

If you are interested in testing out features early (and don't mind the potential occasional instability), then you might be interested in Windows Terminal Preview...