Re: Is there an official Fedora for WSL?

[Gordon Messmer]

On 6/2/20 4:52 AM, Code Zombie wrote:
>  Is there an official branch of Fedora for WSL or a plan to create
> one? 

The good news is that it's reasonably straightforward to install an 
unpackaged distribution, you just need a tarball of the distribution.  
And lots of those are available for use with podman (or docker).  For 
example I can pull the CentOS 7 container image and then save that to an 
archive:

     podman pull centos:7
     podman save centos:7 -o centos7.tar

Inside "centos7.tar" is another tar archive, which is the base layer for 
the centos:7 image.  Copy centos7.tar to your Windows system, and 
extract it there.  Now you can import that and then run it:

     wsl --import centos7 c:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Packages\Centos7 
centos7\*.tar
     wsl -d centos7

You'll usually want to set a registry key to change the default user... 
(HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{ 
assigned GUID })

It's not click and run by any means, but it's feasible.

The bad news, though, is that current versions of rpm (and dnf) won't 
work under WSL if you're on a Windows version older than 2004, so you 
might be stuck with CentOS 7 if you're on an employer-managed laptop 
that is still running an older release of Windows (as I am, during the 
work day): https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/3939