Tag Archives: wsl

Introducing show-motd, Message Of The Day for WSL and container shells

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People logging in to Ubuntu systems via SSH or on the virtual terminals are familiar with the Message Of The Day greeter which contains useful URLs and important system information including the number of updates that need to be installed manually.

However, when starting a Ubuntu container or a Ubuntu terminal on WSL, you are entering a shell directly which is way less welcoming and also hides if there are software updates waiting to be installed:

user@host:~$ lxc shell bionic-container
root@bionic-container:~#

To make containers and the WSL shell friendlier to new users and more informative to experts it would be nice to show MOTD there, too, and this is exactly what the show-motd package does. The message is printed only once every day in the first started interactive shell to provide up-to-date information without becoming annoying. The package is now present in Ubuntu 19.10 and WSL users already get it installed when running apt upgrade.
Please give it a try and tell us what you think!

Bug reports, feature requests are welcome and if the package proves to be useful it will be backported to current LTS releases!

Ubuntu on WSL: X and sound server detection explained

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When I started using Ubuntu more than a decade ago I was impressed how well it worked out of the box. It detected most of my machine’s hardware and I could start working on it immediately. The Windows Subsystem for Linux is a much newer Ubuntu platform which can also run graphical applications without any extra configuration inside Ubuntu.

If you set up and start an X server or a PulseAudio server on Windows and start Ubuntu in WSL, the starting Ubuntu instance detects the presence of the servers and caches the configuration while the instance is running. The detection takes a few hundred milliseconds at the first start in the worst case, but using a cached configuration is fast and the delay is unnoticeable in subsequently started shells.

The detection is performed by /etc/profile.d/wsl-integration.sh from the wslu package and the configuration is cached in $HOME/.cache/wslu/integration.

If you would like to use a different X or sound configuration, like redirecting graphical applications to a remote X server you can prepopulate the cached configuration with a script running before /etc/profile.d/wsl-integration.sh or you can disable the detection logic with a similar script by making $HOME/.cache/wslu/integration an empty file.

Downloadable Ubuntu WSL tarballs to the latest release and beyond!

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Ubuntu LTS releases are already available from the Microsoft Store (link) as apps, but there are other ways of installing Ubuntu for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. You can import the Ubuntu tarball with the wsl command or use graphical interfaces listed at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WSL#Third-party_tools for custom managing tarballs.

Such Ubuntu tarballs were not publicly available in the past, but now I proudly present the downloadable WSL tarballs for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial), 18.04 LTS (Bionic), 19.04 (Disco), and the for the still in development 19.10 (Eoan) release. Thanks to everyone in the Ubuntu Foundations, Certified Public Cloud and Desktop Teams who helped to make this happen!

While we still recommend installing the Ubuntu WSL app from the Microsoft Store, using the tarballs lets you maintain more parallel Ubuntu instances which can be handy for experiments and you can also take a look at the next Ubuntu versions!

If you find a program or HOW-TO that installs other Ubuntu tarballs for WSL, please help by asking their author to use the official tarballs, because only the WSL tarballs include the WSL integration packages as described in the previous post!

Introducing ubuntu-wsl, the package making Ubuntu better and better on WSL

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The Ubuntu apps for the Windows Subsystem for Linux provide the very same packages you can find on Ubuntu servers, desktops, cloud instances and containers, and this ensures maximal compatibility with other Ubuntu installations. Until recently there was little work done to integrate Ubuntu with the Windows system running the WSL environment, but now this is changing.

In Ubuntu metapackages collect packages useful for a common purpose by depending on them and ubuntu-wsl is the new metapackage to collect integration packages to be installed on every Ubuntu WSL system. It pulls in wslu, “A collection of utilities for WSL” to let you create shortcuts on the Windows desktop with wslusc, start the default Windows browser with wslview, and do a few other things:

With updates to the ubuntu-wsl metapackage we will add new features to Ubuntu WSL installations to make them even more comfortable to use, thus if you have an older installation please install the package manually:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ubuntu-wsl

Oh, and one more thing, you can even set up sound and run graphical apps if you make a few manual steps. For details check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WSL!

Run Ubuntu on Windows, even multiple releases in parallel!

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Running Linux terminals on Windows needs just a few clicks since we can install Ubuntu, Debian and other distributions right from the Store as apps, without the old days’ hassle of dual-booting or starting virtual machines. It just works and it works even in enterprise environments where installation policies are tightly controlled.

If you check the Linux distribution apps based on the Windows Subsystem for Linux technology you may notice that there is not only one Ubuntu app, but there are already three, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04. This is no accident. It matches the traditional Ubuntu release offering where the LTS releases are supported for long periods and there is always a recommended LTS release for production:

  • Ubuntu 16.04 (code name: Xenial) was the first release really rocking on WSL and it will be updated in the Store until 16.04’s EOL, April, 2021.
  • Ubuntu 18.04 (code name: Bionic) is the current LTS release (also rocking :-)) and the first one supporting even ARM64 systems on Windows. It will be updated in the Store until 18.04’s EOL, April, 2023.
  • Ubuntu (without the release version) always follows the recommended release, switching over to the next one when it gets the first point release. Right now it installs Ubuntu 16.04 and will switch to 18.04.1, on 26th July, 2018.

The apps in the Store are like installation kits. Each app creates a separate root file system in which Ubuntu terminals are opened but app updates don’t change the root file system afterwards. Installing a different app in parallel creates a different root file system allowing you to have both Ubuntu LTS releases installed and running in case you need it for keeping compatibility with other external systems. You can also upgrade your Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 by running ‘do-release-upgrade’ and have three different systems running in parallel, separating production and sandboxes for experiments.

What amazes me in the WSL technology is not only that Linux programs running directly on Windows perform surprisingly well (benchmarks), but the coverage of programs you can run unmodified without any issues and without the large memory overhead of virtual machines.

I hope you will enjoy the power or the Linux terminals on Windows at least as much we enjoyed building the apps at Canonical working closely with Microsoft to make it awesome!