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WSL

Installing Ubuntu as WSL

To installed a linux distribution for as a windows subsytem (wsl).

I like Ubuntu, but you can do something else if you want. You can install Ubuntu from the microsoft store (blocked at CDC) or manually install. Then you will need to go into the powershell and enable wsl see here and here.

dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart

It’s likely there will be updates that are necessary so run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove

Switching from WSL-1 to WSL-2

If you are going to use docker then you have to upgrade to WSL2. You can read about how they are different on microsoft’s page. You can switch back and forth between WSL-1 and WSL-2 more details here and microsofts documentation. Microsoft has more details on WSL2.

“… no plans to deprecate WSL 1. You can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side, and can upgrade and downgrade any distro at any time. Adding WSL 2 as a new architecture presents a better platform for the WSL team to deliver features that make WSL an amazing way to run a Linux environment in Windows.”

To switch versions of your distro go to your windows powershell:

First, check the name of the wsl distros that are present in your system and their versions.

wsl --list --verbose

To switch from WSL-1 to WSL-2:

wsl --set-version <distribution name> <versionNumber>

WSL-2 Issues and Troubleshooting

1

Warning: WSL-2 has known issues 1 and 2 that if you convert to WSL-2 it will break commands that connect to the internet (wget, apt-get, ping, conda etc…). See the installing wsl page for more details.

And as one person on github put it:

“I’ve given up on WSL completely. WSL 2 has network adaptor issues and WSL 1 has no docker integration. It’s amazing that despite having a fully dockerized environment, I cannot work on Windows.”

How to fix this!

If you do this:

ping 1.1.1.1

You should see some output like this:

PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.

However, if you try to ping an internet site like ping www.google.com you will get the following error Temporary failure in name resolution.

Steps that have worked for me: Which I got from @JohnnyQuest1983 commented on Jul 30, 2020 here. There are several versions of this answer scattered across many github issue pages.

Open your distro (for me Ubuntu). There are two file we will reference for this fix /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/wsl.conf.

Create wsl.conf, however you see fit. sudo vim wsl.conf or sudo touch wsl.conf we will edit it later.

Add these lines to wsl.conf:

[network]
generateResolvConf=false

Close and reopen your distro.

At this point, thanks to wsl.conf, run/resolv.conf should no longer exist and will never be created again.

Delete the existing symlink file if it still exists

sudo rm resolv.conf

Create a new resolv.conf, however you see fit. sudo vim resolv.conf or sudo touch resolv.conf.

Add this line to resolv.conf:

nameserver 8.8.8.8

Per github you can replace 8.8.8.8 with your preferred functional nameserver, but I don’t know what that would be so I just used 8.8.8.8

Exit and restart your computer. Boot your distro. Now it should be fixed, kinda.

Warning: This workaround will only work when you are off the CDC VPN :( This isn’t ideal, but either are computers.

2

You might see this error:

Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer

Solutions are outlined in this github issue. The following worked for me.

Close your distro and open command prompt in admin mode. Run the following:

sc stop vmcompute
sc start vmcompute

Reopen your distro and it should be back to “normal”