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 few more options in Windows Store. I was unable to find my preferred distribution Arch Linux. Few option is available off shell and in current document will describe how to install and configure Arch Linux under WSL using ArchWSL.

Installation procedure is straightforward.

Requirements

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

• Follow Installation instructions from ArchWSL
• Once Up and Running let’s follow below setup

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 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

• Create user

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 pacur 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 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

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

Create shortcut for Windows to start WSL with created user

Arch.exe config — default-user your_user_name

Additional you can run docker by installing docker binary “sudo pacman -S docker” but in order to used docker in WSL you need to have Docker installed in Windows and expose Docker API to tcp://0.0.0.0:2375

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

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://0.0.0.0:2375