An alternative development WSL 2 setup with Ubuntu GUI

You might have seen my last article “A working WSL 2 Ubuntu development setup” which uses a program called “genie” to start systemd on WSL 2.

There is an alternative approach described in this blog post which I would like to discuss here now.

While that post mainly wants to enable snap on WSL 2, it also brings systemd, thus the goal is very comparable to the approach in my first article.

Basic installation

So let’s start with executing all steps in the linked blog post including the section “/etc/bash.bashrc”.

As of this writing, the location of daemonize changed from /usr/sbin to /usr/bin, so I added a sym-link:

ln -s /usr/bin/daemonize /usr/sbin/daemonize

I also changed the file/etc/default/locale to

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

and did a “wsl --shutdown” in the Windows PowerShell to make this change effective.

Installing Gnome

The next step is to install a GUI via

sudo apt install -y tasksel
sudo tasksel install ubuntu-desktop

which is similar to my last article.

X11 Server on Windows

Also see my last article in how to set up and start an X11 Server on Windows. The section “Starting VcXsrv in Windows 10” described the necessary steps.

Configuration

Add the following lines to the .profile file in your user’s home directory

export DISPLAY=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | cut -d ' ' -f 2):0
export NO_AT_BRIDGE=1
unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS

The first line sets the DISPLAY variable so X11 forwarding to Windows works.

The second line sets a variable to suppress a warning when starting the gnome terminal.

Row three and four are also needed to start gnome terminal. Frankly I don't understand why, I just tried-and-error'ed until it worked, so any explanation is appreciated.

Fish

As I like to use fish as my Unix shell, I install it via:

sudo apt install -y fish

but the setup of systemd in this scenario depends on bash, so we keep bash as the standard shell for my user.

Instead I change the default shell just for the gnome-terminal which is my default terminal application anyway.

So start the gnome terminal via:

gnome-terminal

and go to the preferences dialog and change it to:

Known issues

• I had issues in terms of "WSL can talk properly to Windows", mainly in regards to the Unix sockets in /run/WSL and the shell variable WSL_INTEROP. If those are wrong you cannot use code (aka Visual Studio Code) from WSL anymore, which is obviously very annoying, I often had to set WSL_INTEROP manually

Conclusion

Generally this approach works as fine as the first one, but the advantages and disadvantages are different.

Pros:

• You don’t have to deal with initializing “genie” and entering those bottles (aka namespaces) — …

Cons:

• …still the basic underlying issue of a separated process tree still exists
• The issue around WSL_INTEROP was very severe for me
• Fish is not the default shell — only the gnome-terminal uses it by default