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

Calling Windows apps from Linux

In Chapter 4, Windows to Linux Interoperability, we saw how we can use the wsl command to call Linux applications from Windows. Going the other way (calling Windows applications from Linux) is even easier! To see this in action, fire up a terminal in your WSL distro and run /mnt/c/Windows/System32/calc.exe to launch the Windows Calculator app directly from Linux. If Windows is not installed in C:\Windows, then update the path to match. In this way, you can launch any Windows application from a terminal in your WSL distros.

In the case of Windows Calculator (and many other applications), WSL actually makes it even easier. This time, type calc.exe in your terminal and Windows Calculator will still run. The reason this works is that calc.exe is in your Windows path and (by default) WSL will map your Windows path to the Linux path in your WSL distros. To demonstrate this, run echo $PATH in the terminal:

$ echo $PATH
/home/stuart/.local/bin:/home/stuart...