Eduardo Ortega

I am a Cloud/Software Architect who loves coding, design cloud apps and learning new things everyday. Here I write things to my future me.

1 minute read

In my past job I had the chance to work on a project using NodeJS, to be honest, I don’t like JavaScript very much (I don’t like frontend development) and at that time it was a pain for me as a backend developer.

As time passed by I felt more confident in using javascript and even installed a second OS on my laptop (I installed Ubuntu) just to feel more comfortable developing for NodeJS. I am mainly a .NET developer, which means that at some point I’m forced to use Windows as my main OS or that is what I thought until I heard about WSL which is a Linux running inside windows natively (You don’t need a VM) and I’m very happy having the best from both worlds, we can use even docker for Linux instead of installing it on Windows!.

Prerequisites

  • Windows 10/11.
  • I highly recommend installing the new and shiny Windows Terminal, just go to the Windows Store and search ‘Windows Terminal’.

Install WSL2

WSL2 is the most recent version of WSL and can be installed in Windows 10 or Windows 11, so that’s the version we are going to install.

First, we need to open up a PowerShell or a cmd prompt with elevated privileges, now we will check what distributions do we have available to install running this command:

wsl --list --online

We will see a list of the available distributions that we can install like this:

NAME              FRIENDLY NAME
Ubuntu            Ubuntu
Debian            Debian GNU/Linux
kali-linux        Kali Linux Rolling
Ubuntu-20.04      Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In my case I´d like to install Ubuntu 20.04, since this is the last and default distribution we can just run:

wsl --install

Or we can specify the Linux distro we like:

wsl --install -d Ubuntu-20.04

If everything went well, we can now use Ubuntu by opening a new tab in Windows Terminal and selecting Ubuntu. That was not my case, y faced an error:

wslRegisterDistribution failed with error: 0x80370102

What I did to fix this was enable the CPU Virtualization in the BIOS, which lead us to conclude that what Windows does is create a VM for executing Linux.

That would be all for this time.

Happy coding!

Tags:

Categories:

Updated:

You May Also Enjoy

Inmutable Types

1 minute read

Immutable types, as the name suggests, are types whose state cannot be modified after they are created. In simpler terms, once an immutable variable or objec...

Diagrams as code

less than 1 minute read

Hey Edu from the future!, do you remember that time when you had to use Enterprise Architect to create an UML diagram?, and if you want to modify something y...

Sqids for obfuscating ID’s

less than 1 minute read

Sqids is a lightweight, open-source library that generates short, unique, and human-readable IDs from arbitrary data. Its primary goal is to provide a simple...

A guide to VSCode profiles

1 minute read

Hey future Edu, I want to take a moment to reflect on one of the most powerful features in VSCode that has greatly improved my productivity: VSCode Profiles.