It ‘twas the morning of July 18, 2019 as I was working on this site; just polishing up a few tidbits, when my 2012 Macbook Pro became quite warm and decided to poweroff, never to return again. About 30 minutes had past while I aimlessly troubleshot, but ultimately I found myself on Apple’s support site scheduling an appointment to have my laptop serviced.

My initial thought after setting up my appointment:

Que sera sera! I get a little vacation from technology, wonderful!

What if I come up with an amazing, life altering, idea that required the use of my most familiar working enivironment - a terminal (iterm2) and my precious dotfiles (nothing too crazy), git, vim, and maybe a few others.

It was the very next moment when I found myself gazing across the room towards my desk, taking notice to my Windows 10 desktop. The desktop was not used often so it only had a modest amount of dust on it, but its initial and main purpose is to serve as a decent gaming rig; now (NOW…) though, it had to elevate its purpose to new heights.

But wait… its Windows 10, and I favor a Unix-like terminal environment with vim and bash; while this dusty machine could offer me… what? Notepad and PowerShell.

Oh, but wait… I remember some mentions from a couple years back of Windows 10 offering an embedded Ubuntu Linux; perhaps there is some saving grace after all.

Thus, my journey begun… and here within this blog, I will detail my findings in hopes that it may bring another hope in a similar time of need.

Enabling Windows Subsystem for Linux

Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Open PowerShell as an Administrator and run:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Restart your computer when prompted.

Install your Linux Distribution of Choice

There are a few choices for installing Linux on your Windows 10 machine:

• Download and install from the Microsoft Store
• Download and install from the Command-Line/Script
• Download and manually unpack and install (for Windows Server)

I chose the first option - Download and install from the Microsoft Store.

The list of distributions available to install was quite surprising; to name a few - SUSE, Debian, and Kali Linux were among others on the list. For the task at hand, I decided to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) from the Microsoft Store

Opening the Microsoft Store, searching for “Ubuntu”, and selecting “Install” was the minimal effort I needed to put in to begin the download and install process.

Once the install completed, the option to “Launch” was available and I did what came naturally next - I clicked “Launch”.

A seemingly familiar black backgrounded terminal appeared on my screen:

Installing, this may take a few minutes...
Please create a default UNIX user account. The username does not need to match your Windows username.
For more information visit: https://aka.ms/wslusers
Enter new UNIX username: mhassel
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Installation successful!
To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo ".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Release:        18.04
Codename:       bionic

Ah’mazing! Ubuntu running on Windows 10! BTW… the Ubuntu terminal window has opacity built-in; I like to rock it at 80%.

After making sure I was on the latest and greatest:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

I was finally up and running; and just needed to apply my dotfiles, and install nvm and a few other tools. I could head back to the couch, no longer worried that I may miss out on pursuing the most amazing idea if it would come to me.

Reference: Windows Subsystem for Linux Installation Guide for Windows 10