Deploy Arch Linux on Windows Subsystem for Linux “WSL”

WSL brings few advantages over VM installation “Install Arch Linux on Windows 10 Hyper-V” Originally, WSL was running Ubuntu 14.4 and now you can find a few more options in the Windows Store. I was unable to find my preferred distribution, Arch Linux. There are a few options available off the shelf, and this document will describe how to install and configure Arch Linux under WSL using ArchWSL.

The installation procedure is straightforward.

Requirements

• Download latest ArchWSL
• Install Windows Subsystem for Linux “WSL”

• Follow Installation instructions from ArchWSL
• Once you're up and running let’s follow the setup below:

Install development tools:

pacman -Syyu 
pacman -S base-devel
pacman -S p7zip unzip pygmentize docker vim htop git jq openssh rsync

Install additional tools if you want. like tmux, python, go, etc.:

pacman -S packer-io terraform tmux go python

Next, we will try to deploy AUR where we can find additional software maintained by the community for Arch Linux.

nano /etc/pacman.conf

[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

Sync pacman and install yaourt:

pacman -Syyu && pacman -S yaourt && yaourt -Syyu

Let’s create a user as we don’t want to run with root all the time.

useradd -m -g users -s /bin/bash your_user_name
passwd your_user_name
usermod -aG wheel your_user_name

visudo

%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

I prefer pacaur instead of yaourt. Pacaur requires additional dependencies to be installed under WSL

Install pacaur and dependencies:

• Add gpg key

gpg — recv-key 1EB2638FF56C0C53

Install fakeroot-tcp by creating and running the script:

#!/bin/bash

mkdir sources
cd sources
wget http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fakeroot/fakeroot_1.22.orig.tar.bz2

tar xvf fakeroot_1.22.orig.tar.bz2
cd fakeroot-1.22/
./bootstrap
./configure — prefix=/opt/fakeroot \
 — libdir=/opt/fakeroot/libs \
 — disable-static \
 — with-ipc=tcp

make
sudo make install

• Add fakeroot to the path

nano /etc/profile

# If user ID is greater than or equal to 1000 & if /opt/fakeroot/bin exists and is a directory & if /opt/fakeroot/bin is not already in your $PATH
# then export ~/bin to your $PATH.
if [[ $UID -ge 1000 && -d /opt/fakeroot/bin && -z $(echo $PATH | grep -o /opt/fakeroot/bin ) ]]
then
export PATH=”${PATH}:/opt/fakeroot/bin”
fi

Install pacaur and additional packages, in this case, Kubernetes-specific packages:

yaourt -S pacaur
pacaur -Syyua

sudo pacman -R fakeroot
pacaur -S kubernetes-kubectl kubernetes-helm istio

Create a shortcut for Windows to start WSL with created user

Arch.exe config — default-user your_user_name

Additionally, you can run Docker by installing the Docker binary  sudo pacman -S docker , but in order to use Docker in WSL, you need to have Docker installed in Windows and expose the Docker API to tcp://0.0.0.0:2375.

In .bashrc, add the below entry to allow Docker from WSL  to access Windows Docker.

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://0.0.0.0:2375