WSL Tips

• Access Linux files from Windows

            After installing WSL and Linux distro, if you type \\WSL$ on the address bar of Windows Explorer, you can see all Linux distro that are installed on your machine. And from that, you can access to the file system of the Linux distro from Windows.

 

• Access Windows files from Linux

            WSL automatically mount the Windows drive as /mnt. To access C drive, we can use /mnt/c

• Export/Import a Distro

            If we work with multiple projects and each project need different set of tools, then we can clone the base distro by export and import with a new name.

            Export: wsl --export ...

            Import: wsl --import ...

• Create a custom Distro from a docker container
• Firstly, we pull a container from Docker hub 
• Second step is to start the container with docker run  command.
• Third step: we add user for WSL

                    useradd -m YOURUSERNAME

                    passwd YOURUSERNAME

• Then we add /etc/wsl.conf file to let WSL know the user we created

                    echo -e "[user] \ndefault=YOURUSERNAME" > /etc/wsl.conf

• If we want to add more configuration, we can add at this step.
• After finish adding the configurations, we can export the Docker container to the Tar file using docker export command.
• Then we use wsl --import  command to import the Tar file. And now we have a new Distro to run.
• Create a custom Distro from a docker container using Docker file

            For the manual steps above, we can build a Docker file to create a custom Distro.