WSL-DistroLauncher VS WSL2-Linux-Kernel

Any chance we can get something that can be used with WSL 2? Personally, I prefer to use MX on everything I can. WSL-DistroLauncher/README.md at master · microsoft/WSL-DistroLauncher · GitHub

if you want to fancy it up with icons/title like the store distros, its not too bad to tweak the reference launcher, and feed it a stage 3 ( recompressed to .tar.gz since last time I checked last year, it didn't support .tar.xz)

There isn’t a lot of guess work to pull this off Microsoft has documented the process here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL-DistroLauncher

You can technically run any arbitrary distribution as WSL2, it's just not as simple as installing from an ISO. https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL-DistroLauncher

By the way, Microsoft publishes the WSL kernel source, under GPL, as they must: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

From here on out it gets a bit hazy. For kernel builds you will have to use the Microsoft Linux Kernel (don't laugh, it's actually a thing). The USBIPD project walks through a WSL kernel build, so you can use that as a guide of sorts. Once you've done everything you need with the disk, the Gentoo project shows how to import it, but if you already have the VHDX file, I think the import-in-place option may be simpler. Take care in CH2 when making the filesystem. I'm not sure if WSL want's only one ext4 partition or if it walks the disk looking for root. There may be some .wslconfig settings for this, my first guess would be kernelCommandLine.

This was true for WSL1, but WSL2 does contain a Linux kernel. The source code for it is available at:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

git clone --branch mytag0.1 --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel use tag for your version

But if you need a custom kernel then build it by taking Microsoft's kernel config as your base and then set the following up accordingly in your %USERPROFILE%\.wslconfig file:

It uses a customized version of the Linux kernel (repo) that integrates with the host Windows OS. You can build any distro on top of that kernel, as people have done with (of course) Arch. The distro isn't any less "real" than a distro that it run on QEMU (and with a level 1 hypervisor, all systems that uses one are technically virtualized already).

I recompiled the kernel using sources from https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel with experimental genpatches applied.

KERNVER=$(uname -r | cut -f 1 -d'-') git clone --branch linux-msft-$KERNVER --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.git ~/kern-$KERNVER zcat /proc/config.gz > ~/kern-$KERNVER/.config make -C ~/kern-$KERNVER -j 4 make -C ~/kern-$KERNVER -j 4 modules_install ln -s /lib/modules/$KERNVER-microsoft-standard-WSL2+ /lib/modules/$KERNVER-microsoft-standard-WSL2