Installing WSL

• Open Powershell as Administrator and run Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
• Open the Microsoft Store and search for 'Run Linux on Windows'
• Select and install your distribution of choice
• Run the distribution from the Start menu, or by running <distro>.exe from the command prompt (eg. ubuntu.exe)
• The first run will take a few minutes to unpack the distribution, then prompt you to set up a Linux username and password to use.
• You will now be at a bash prompt, ready to go.
• It's probably a good idea to do a software update immediately - on Debian or Ubuntu, run sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Using WSL

Running graphical programs under WSL

• First, you will need to download and install an X server for Windows.

• Once that's done, you'll need to edit your .profile file:

• Start up your Linux distribution and run nano ~/.profile

• Scroll to the bottom of the file and add the line export DISPLAY="localhost:0.0"

• Exit and restart your distribution (or just source ~/.profile)

• You can now install packages such as gedit, and have graphical Linux applications pop up on your Windows desktop

• You should also be able to SSH to other Linux machines and run graphical applications there as well

• This will require that you use the -Y flag to ssh - eg: ssh -Y z1234567@login.cse.unsw.edu.au