when the ride is more important than the destination…
Moving files around between WSL instances and Windows just got a whole lot easier on Windows 11. All you need to do is scroll down in the left pane until you see Linux and can access the filesystem from any WSL instance to copy files to it, grab files from it and whatever it is you need.
Previously on Windows 10, you could access the special UNC path \\wsl$ to access the filesystem of a running WSL instance, but in Windows 11 you can access any WSL instance without the need to have it running.
The following distributions I have installed/created, tested and used under WSL2 and Windows 10.
As you can see, if you can find your favorite distribution in the Microsoft Store, great, if not or if its only available as a paid distribution, just bake your own. It’s not that difficult and really there is no reason why you should not have the Linux distribution of your choice available under WSL2.
Introduction – WSL 2 on Windows 10 introduced the ability to run a native linux kernel on your computer while using Windows 10 as your main operating system. Instead of emulating a Linux kernel, like WSL 1 does, WSL 2 uses a lightweight hypervisor to run linux in parallel with Windows.
To be able to run WSL 2 on Windows 10, installation of Windows 10 feature update 2004 is required.
An explanation on how to enable WSL2 support can be found on the page detailing how to create a Gentoo instance on WSL2.
Any Linux distribution on Windows? – Yes, you can run any distribution of Linux on WSL quickly and easily, provided that:
1) a Docker image for that distribution is available.
2) you install your distribution as normal in a virtual machine first
For the Docker method
docker pull <image name for your Linux distro>
docker create --name <distro> <image name for your distro>
docker export -o <distro>.tar <distro>
wsl --import "<distro>" "<location for your wsl distro>" "PATH/TO/<distro>.tar" --version 2How does it work – The first line, the docker pull, downloads the docker image to your computer. This can be any image, as long as it is Linux based, but since you are trying to get a specific Linux distribution for use in WSL, the assumption is it is an image for a Linux distro.
The second line, the docker create, creates the docker container. It doesn’t start it, it just creates it so you don’t have to worry about containers all of a sudden taking up resources/
The third line, the docker export, dumps the container into a tar archive. This is the file we need for WSL and contains the entire Linux distribution. At this point, you can throw away your docker container if you want as we do not need it anymore.
Lastly, we are importing the tar archive we created from the docker container into WSL. We can now boot our newly created Linux distro of our choice in WSL and use it, modify it and work it like we want to.
NOTE: This process works in reverse as well! If you want to create and use a docker image from any WSL2 instance you have created you can simply export the WSL distro to a tar archive and import that into Docker and fire it up!
For the virtual machine method
After you have installed the virtual machine, log into the virtual machine and issue the following commands.
Note: this also works for physical Linux machine or dual boot system where you want to copy the Linux system to WSL!
$ sudo su -
# cd /
# tar -cpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/tmp --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys /This will create a tar archive of the entire system. This can get quite big, especially if you are doing this from a previously installed system and not a clean, base install so make sure you have enough space to save it.
When the tar file has been created, copy it to your Windows machine somehow and issue the following command:
wsl --import "<Your_Distro_Name>" "<Location_to_store_your_Distro>" "PATH/TO/<archive.tar>" --version 2This will create the WSL instance by side-loading it and you can start it by issueing wsl.exe -d <Your_Distro_Name> or by opening Windows Terminal; it should already be listed in the dropdown menu as one of the options.
Introduction – WSL 2 on Windows 10 introduced the ability to run a native linux kernel on your computer while using Windows 10 as your main operating system. Instead of emulating a linux kernel, like WSL 1 does, WSL 2 uses a hypervisor to run linux in parallel with Windows.
To be able to run WSL 2 on Windows 10, installation of Windows 10 feature update 2004 or newer is required.
Enabling WSL2 support – Open an administrator PowerShell by pressing Windows + X, then A or select PowerShell (Run as Administrator) from the start menu. Execute the following commands to enable the hypervisor to start on system boot.
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatformDownload the latest stage 3 build from the gentoo website (https://gentoo.org/downloads/). Select the profile which suits your needs. In my case I decided to use the most up-to-date, non-hardened, no-multilib, amd64 stage3 build.
Quick-Link to index: current-stage3-amd64-nomultilib
non-hardened: This is only a development system, so no hardening is needed.
no-multilib: Who needs x86 support anyway when compiling from source?
amd64: Because an up-to-date Windows 10 should be running on an up-to-date amd64 plaform.
Convert the tar.xz archive into an uncompressed tar archive by opening it with 7-Zip and selecting the extract option from the menu. Or use a Linux distro on WSL already installed. Do not extract the linux filesystem packed in the tar archive.
Open an administrator command promt / PowerShell by pressing Windows + X, then A or select PowerShell (Run as Administrator) from the start menu. Run the following command to import the userspace image into your WSL configuration. Be sure that you provide full paths and didn’t forget the –version argument. The destination path can be adjusted to your liking and is preferably on an SSD with at least 25 GB of free space. The import command will create a single virtual disk image (ext4.vhdx) in the destination folder.
wsl.exe --import "Gentoo" "D:\path\to\your\installation\directory" "C:\path\to\your\folder\stage3-amd64-nomultilib-20191113T214501Z.tar" --version 2If you forgot the –version switch, the result of the command above is an extracted linux filesystem in the specified Windows folder. Remove the distribution with wsl –unregister and restart the import operation.
WSL setup in Gentoo – As with every new piece of software, the configuration needs some changes on the WSL / Gentoo side to run smoothly. Run the following commands on the Gentoo instance to fix problems with a non-functional nameserver configuration and file system attributes on Windows drives.
#!/bin/bash
set -e -x
# Delete auto-generated files
rm /etc/resolv.conf || true
rm /etc/wsl.conf || true
# Enable changing /etc/resolv.conf
# Enable extended attributes on Windows drives
cat <<EOF > /etc/wsl.conf
[network]
generateResolvConf = false
[automount]
enabled = true
options = "metadata"
mountFsTab = false
EOF
# Use google nameservers for DNS resolution
cat <<EOF > /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4
EOFCreate a .wslconfig configuration file for WSL in the Windows user directory. This is necessary to set a maximum size limit of the RAM which WSL may consume. Sometimes the linux kernel uses a portion of the free memory as cache and therefore will start to “eat away” all RAM of the host system. This can be mitigated by setting the memory configuration option. Replace YOURUSERNAME with your Windows username in the script below.
#!/bin/bash
set -e -x
cat <<EOF > /mnt/c/Users/YOURUSERNAME/.wslconf
[wsl2]
#kernel=
memory=8GB
#processors=
#swap=
#swapFile=
localhostForwarding=true
EOFNow close all instances of Gentoo / WSL and stop the virtual machine by opening the Command Prompt (Windows-Key + X, then A) and issuing the command wsl –shutdown.
Gentoo setup in WSL – Run all following commands in the Gentoo instance.
For gentoo to work correctly under the hypervisor some feature flags have to be disabled. Open the file /etc/portage/make.conf and adjust the following settings. Below is an example configuration used for my system.
– Add FEATURES=”-ipc-sandbox -pid-sandbox -mount-sandbox -network-sandbox” to disbable the non-functional sandboxing features
– Adjust COMMON_FLAGS to match your PC architecture.
– Adjust USE to your needs
– Ajdust MAKEOPTS to the number of CPU cores (+1) to make the compilation faster
– The other options are all optional
# No GUI (-X -gtk), only english error messages (-nls)
USE="-X -gtk -nls"
# Enable python 3.7 and set 3.6 as default
PYTHON_TARGETS="python3_6 python3_7"
PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_6"
# Define targets for QEMU
QEMU_SOFTMMU_TARGETS="aarch64 arm i386 riscv32 riscv64 x86_64"
QEMU_USER_TARGETS="aarch64 arm i386 riscv32 riscv64 x86_64"
# No hardware videocard support
VIDEO_CARDS="dummy"
# Disable non-functional sandboxing features
FEATURES="-ipc-sandbox -pid-sandbox -mount-sandbox -network-sandbox"
# Always ask when managing packages, always consider deep dependencies (slow) EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--ask --complete-graph"
# Enable optimizations for the used CPU
COMMON_FLAGS="-march=haswell -O2 -pipe"
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
CXXFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
FCFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
FFLAGS="${COMMON_FLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j5"
# NOTE: This stage was built with the bindist Use flag enabled
PORTDIR="/var/db/repos/gentoo"
DISTDIR="/var/cache/distfiles"
PKGDIR="/var/cache/binpkgs"
# This sets the language of build output to English.
# Please keep this setting intact when reporting bugs.
LC_MESSAGES=CFinal installation steps – To finish the Gentoo installation a new snapshot of the ebuild repository should be downloaded. A recompilation of the compiler ensures that GCC is on the most recent stable version. After updating GCC a recompilation of all programs / libraries ensures that the set optimizations take effect.
#!/bin/bash
set -e -x
# Download a snapshot of all official ebuilds
emerge-webrsync
# Upgrade the compiler and the required libtool library
emerge --oneshot --deep sys-devel/gcc
emerge --oneshot --usepkg=n sys-devel/libtool
# Update all packages with the newly built compiler
# This will take a long time, ~1-5 hours
emerge --oneshot --emptytree --deep @world
emerge --oneshot --deep @preserved-rebuild
emerge --ask --depcleanEnabling overlays for portage – Eselect provides an easy integration of overlays into portage. The main portage respository should already be configured properly, so only a simple installation of eselect is necessary. For more information see the official wiki. Run the command shown below to install the repository module for eselect.
#!/bin/bash
# Install portage overlays
emerge --ask app-eselect/eselect-repository The configuration for the plugin is located in the /etc/eselect/repository.conf file. The default path of the repository index is specified by the REPOS_CONF option which points to /etc/portage/repos.conf by default. Make sure that this directory exists or create it with the following command.
mkdir -p /etc/portage/repos.confA file named gentoo.conf should be located in this directory (/etc/portage/repos.conf) which holds the configuration for the main gentoo repository. Below is an example default configuration file which was created on my system.
[DEFAULT]
main-repo = gentoo
[gentoo]
location = /var/db/repos/gentoo
sync-type = rsync
sync-uri = rsync://rsync.de.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage/
auto-sync = yes
sync-rsync-verify-jobs = 1
sync-rsync-verify-metamanifest = yes
sync-rsync-verify-max-age = 24
sync-openpgp-key-path = /usr/share/openpgp-keys/gentoo-release.asc
sync-openpgp-keyserver = hkps://keys.gentoo.org
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-count = 40
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-overall-timeout = 1200
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-delay-exp-base = 2
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-delay-max = 60
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-delay-mult = 4
sync-webrsync-verify-signature = yesThe synchronization of emerge can now be done via the command below. This might take some time, depending on the internet speed and if the repository was synchronized before.
emerge –sync
Using Git for portage sync – An alternative method to sync the portage repository is to use git. For this the git package has to be installed on the system as shown below.
#!/bin/bash
# Install the git version control system
emerge --ask dev-vcs/gitEdit the sync-type and sync-uri in the portage configuration file under /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf as shown below.
[DEFAULT]
main-repo = gentoo
[gentoo]
location = /var/db/repos/gentoo
#sync-type = rsync
#sync-uri = rsync://rsync.de.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage/
sync-type = git
sync-uri = https://github.com/gentoo-mirror/gentoo.git
auto-sync = yes
sync-rsync-verify-jobs = 1
sync-rsync-verify-metamanifest = yes
sync-rsync-verify-max-age = 24
sync-openpgp-key-path = /usr/share/openpgp-keys/gentoo-release.asc
sync-openpgp-keyserver = hkps://keys.gentoo.org
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-count = 40
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-overall-timeout = 1200
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-delay-exp-base = 2
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-delay-max = 60
sync-openpgp-key-refresh-retry-delay-mult = 4
sync-webrsync-verify-signature = yesPortage will now complain when synchronizing with git for the first time that the repository folder is not empty and that the folder can not be used to clone the git repository into it. This can be fixed by deleting the old rsync-managed repository which is located under /var/db/repos/gentoo when using the default configuration. Use the command below to do this.
#!/bin/bash
# Remove old and generate new repository
rm -r /var/db/repos/gentoo
emerge --sync
# Sync twice to test synchronization speed
emerge --syncFinal bits and bobs and clean-up – Now that we have Gentoo installed and working in WSL2, we should do some cleaning up and do some things to make our lives easier.
First, it would a good idea right now to create and export of our installed Gentoo WSL distribution.
wsl.exe --export Gentoo gentoo.tarStore this file somewhere safe. You can use this later to import the Gentoo again if needed, or use it on another computer without having to go through all the steps above.
Now would also be a good time to add a user to Gentoo that you would normally use, instead of using root. If you are installing Gentoo and have come this far, I probably don’t need to explain how to create a user on Linux. So I am not going to.
After you have created the user, note the user ID. Normally, this would be 1000.
To set the default user for Gentoo to use, we cannot use the normal procedure as used for distributions installed from the Windows store. Instead, we need to open the registry editor and navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\LxssYou will see a list of folders with seemingly random names. One of these is for Gentoo, probably the bottom one. Find the one for Gentoo, and edit the key named “DefaultUid” and set the value to (decimal) 1000 or the number from your user ID if it is something else.
WARNING: if you do this before you have created your username on Gentoo, the distribution will be unusable, however you can fix it by changing the “DefaultUid” back to zero. Changes are in effect immediately; no need to reboot after changing this value.
PRO TIP: If you want to be able to change parameters using the .exe of the distribution as you can when you are using for instance Ubuntu or Debian from the store, grab the .exe from one of these store distro’s and put it in the directory where you installed Gentoo. Then rename the file to the name of the distribution as you have added it to WSL. You can now start your distribution using that .exe and for instance set the default user the normal way.