blog/arch-wsl/

[utterances-bot]

Arch Linux on Windows 10 • Hannu Hartikainen

I recently updated my gaming PC from Windows 7 to 10. I’d heard people talk about WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) so I wanted to try it out. I wasn’t very keen on playing with Ubuntu, though. I used Debian as my main OS for a long time and as Ubuntu came along it felt like a watered-down misconfigured version of Debian (sorry—it’s a great distro, just not my cup of tea).

https://hannuhartikainen.fi/blog/arch-wsl/

[dansteen]

Great article! I'm planning on getting a new laptop sometime soon, and this was really helpful to me in trying to decide whether to try out WSL or just wipe windows and install linux like usual. Would you recommend trying to use WSL as a default development environment, or is that just asking for trouble at this point? I generally do a lot of devops tasks, and a small amount of golang compiling.

Other thoughts ;-)

Don't sell yourself short! This was a great post, and I really appreciate the time you took to write it. I also learned about the aurman tool which I didn't know before (I've been using yaourt for ever). So thank you!

[dancek]

@dansteen thanks for commenting, it's great to hear this post was useful!

I'd personally run Linux natively for development but that might be a matter of taste. Xmonad has better usability than Windows IMO and I mostly use Windows just for gaming. If I needed Windows for some work-related tasks, I might try the WSL approach. It might be nicer than running Windows in VirtualBox inside Linux.

[pbar1]

Great post! Lot more fun running Arch in WSL than Ubuntu. Didn't know about aurman!

[ZeroKnight]

Under "Basic Installation":

5. Change the default user by running Arch.exe config --default-user myuser in a command prompt.

6. Reboot your computer for the change to take effect! This is Windows, remember?

You don't need to reboot for the default-user setting to take effect, you just need to restart the LxssManager service:

sc.exe stop LxssManager
sc.exe start LxssManager

Although rare, one doesn't always have to reboot Windows to get something done 😄

[dancek]

@ZeroKnight good to know, thanks for mentioning that! I'll try to remember to edit the post.

[roachsinai]

Great Post! Thanks a lot!

[roachsinai]

@ZeroKnight helpful tip! Thanks!

[kimhongsu]

Thanks for your post. And aurman has an unknown public key problem on the installation process.
==> Making package: aurman 2.18-1 (Mon 18 Feb 2019 01:00:27 PM DST)
==> Checking runtime dependencies...
==> Checking buildtime dependencies...
==> Retrieving sources...
-> Updating aurman_sources git repo...
Fetching origin
==> Validating source files with md5sums...
aurman_sources ... Skipped
==> Verifying source file signatures with gpg...
aurman_sources git repo ... FAILED (unknown public key 465022E743D71E39)
==> ERROR: One or more PGP signatures could not be verified!

[dancek]

@kimhongsu do note that aurman isn't maintained for public use and the author recomments people to use something else instead. I guess I shouldn't have mentioned an AUR helper at all.

[Patriot2407]

Excellent article! Best one I've seen yet! Thank you!

[ghost]

This is great, thanks!
I wrote an installer script partially based on your article, I use it to automate Arch wsl installation on any new machines and virtualboxes of mine, https://gitlab.com/Cez/wsl-install-script
Just wanted to let you know, this was very helpful!

[kuituhirvi]

yay seems to work.