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setting_up_wsl.md

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Setting up Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Why

WSL runs an actual unix distribution (Ubuntu) allowing you to run Linux commands and programs within Windows on the same filesystem. The bash shell in particular is very useful and we have several scripts that make life easier. These can be run in a WSL shell even if you do everything else in Windows.

It is ok if you do not know Linux. The main motivation for having it is to follow instructions that already write the specific commands.

Install WSL

Follow microsoft's install instructions

Look around

Run WSL to get a shell.

Make sure you installed version 20.04. If not then these instructions might be out of date. lsb_release -rs

Your home directory in this environment is going to be /home/$USER but in a different filesystem than Windows. The windows filesystems will be mounted under /mnt (e.g. your Windows home directory will be /mnt/c/Users/$USER

You can see all the filesystems using the standard unix df (e.g. df -kh to see the information more human-readable)

For convenience make a symbolic link from your Linux home directory to your Windows home directory. This will make it easy to navigate from Linux to the Windows directory where your workspace is.

cd $HOME
ln -s /mnt/c/users/$USER windows

now you can use $HOME/windows to refer to /mnt/c/users/$USER

Install Packages

  1. Add microsoft's package manager
ubuntu_release=`lsb_release -rs`
wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/${ubuntu_release}/packages-microsoft-prod.deb -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb

  1. Add OpenJdk

    Note that this is JDK 17, not JDK 11. I think that is OK.

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install msopenjdk-17

  1. Confirm it is installed

    java -version