Windows Subsystem for Linux

Installing Windows Subsystem for Linux

I’ve been impressed with Windows 10 so far. I’ve been a mac guy since 2011 and recently switched back to windows and so far so good, very impressive improvements. However, I haven’t really gotten the hang of powershell. Mainly beccause its got completely different function names for commonly used functions. For example instead of curl its Invoke-Webrequest, and so on. One really good thing is the WSL or Windows subsystem for Linux. Basically you get to install any Linux distro on Windows without a virtualization layer in between.

I mainly followed instructions from the microsoft site, here’s a summary:

Enable WSL

Run the following in Powershell as admin from a directory

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Download Ubuntu

In powershell run

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1604 -OutFile Ubuntu.appx -UseBasicParsing

Install Ubuntu

In the directory you’ll find a file named ubuntu.appx, double click and this installs ubuntu, and automatically opens a shell as root into it.

Thats it!