Run Linux on Windows 10 / 11

Overview

Lets you run a Linux shell from within Windows 10 / 11 on your laptop / PC. This is in the same way you would as if you had an SSH session to a normal Linux server. This is really convenient if you just want to learn Linux or you have a separate Linux server which you just use occasionally to run specific commands on.

There are no requirements to install any third party software like Cygwin, this is all native Windows.

The shell picks up the networking from your local Computer to give you internet access.

Allows you to run various flavours and versions of the following Linux distros:

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• Kali
• Oracle Linux
• SUSE

Installation Steps

Control Panel > Add Remove Programs > Turn Windows Features on or off

And select Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Once completed it’s time for the first reboot

Go back into PowerShell as administrator and run the following command to update Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

wsl --update

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Then view what distributions are available

wsl --list --online

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If you are looking to install Kali Linux for example, run the following command.

Once command has been run, reboot again

wsl --install Kali-linux

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After the reboot, there will now be a shortcut for your Linux distribution on the Windows Start menu

The first time that you start the program it will go into an initial installation mode which takes a few minutes.

If you find that there is no internet connectivity, then edit the following file and replace the IP address with an internet DNS server such as 8.8.8.8

sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf