Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) {Blog}

notes on installation

This page helped me the most (August 2016); clear steps and screenshots.

Another installation guide went through the pre-requisites, and seems to have the same installation steps, but I did use the above for the final installation.

No matter which method you use, there will probably be at least 2 restarts once critical components are installed. I can't get Windows 10 to stop auto-updating and restarting whenever it wants, anyway....

I first read Scott Hanselman's post on the subject (March 2016), but it was extremely light on the installation details. He links to a 30-minute video he did on using the system, which I've yet to watch.

WSL FAQ

Installing nodejs

Notes @ https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions

But the following is what I used for Node v6

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential

Running

Needed a couple of pre-requisites

sudo apt-get install pkg-config
sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev

I had already installed a package that used canvas (Darius Kazemi's Reverse OCR) and so I navigated to the directory, executed sudo npm i. I had to fake config.js and permissions.js for the app, as well as hard-code some words that were normally obtained from Wordnik (I could have used real keys, but that's outside the scope of this test). I then ran nodejs index.js .... and got an out.png file. I opened it up outside of the WSL BASH - and it was what I expected!

There are other projects I want to try - but this was the first I found back using canvas.
I've been working solely with generated text for the past couple of years due to nodejs image-library issues on windows.
Looks like the WSL may solve all of my problems!

Caveats

It was not as easy as the above - I've cut out all of the obviously embarrassing mistakes (and left only the non-obvious mistakes).

Misc

Files - C:\Users\<Windows-username>\AppData\Local\lxss\home\<WSL-username>

Wikipedia:Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/07/22/fun-with-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux/ - including NetHack
(I've gotten NetHack running on windows in the past connected to windows Emacs. It's been at least 6 years, though....)

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396