Fedora for WSL

[Greg Hellings]

I may be hair-brained to do this, but I've put together an installer for
Fedora on WSL.

It mostly follows the procedures that had been much talked about in a blog
post about running Fedora 33 in the WSL2, but it uses the direct installer
rather than the manual side-loads. It also will install Fedora 34.
Obviously, it's not released into the Windows Store as that requires more
than just some technical bit wrangling. But if you're feeling adventurous,
and you are sometimes relegated to the world of Windows but want to bring
your Fedora along, you can find it here:
https://github.com/greg-hellings/FedoraWSL

Am I crazy? Yep.
Does it work? "Works in dev."
Anything to watch out for? It uses the trustywolf/wslu COPR repository for
installing WSL integration packages. Otherwise it's just raw Fedora bits.

Feel free to flame me if this was a terrible idea.

--Greg

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 12:32:00AM -0500, Greg Hellings wrote:
>  I may be hair-brained to do this, but I've put together an
> installer for
>  Fedora on WSL. 
Hi Greg! Not hair-brained at all -- this is awesome!

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Neal Gompa]

On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 12:44 PM Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 12:32:00AM -0500, Greg Hellings wrote:
>  > I may be hair-brained to do this, but I've put together an installer for
>  > Fedora on WSL.
>
>  Hi Greg! Not hair-brained at all -- this is awesome!
>  
A couple of years back, I was working on porting WSL-DistroLauncher to
be cross compiled with Fedora's MinGW stack. I stopped because of
*reasons*, but it'd be nice to have the WSL stuff in Fedora and I
could probably pick that back up and make it a package in Fedora for
people to trivially generate their own WSL bundles.



--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

[Dan Čermák]

Hi Neal,

Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com&gt; writes:

>  On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 12:44 PM Matthew Miller
>  <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 12:32:00AM -0500, Greg Hellings wrote:
> > > I may be hair-brained to do this, but I've put together an installer for
> > > Fedora on WSL.
> >
> > Hi Greg! Not hair-brained at all -- this is awesome!
> >
>
>  A couple of years back, I was working on porting WSL-DistroLauncher to
>  be cross compiled with Fedora's MinGW stack. I stopped because of
>  *reasons*, but it'd be nice to have the WSL stuff in Fedora and I
>  could probably pick that back up and make it a package in Fedora for
>  people to trivially generate their own WSL bundles. 
Have you looked at openSUSE's patches:
https://github.com/openSUSE/WSL-DistroLauncher ? It works with their
MinGW stack, at the expense of adding autotools into the mix…


Cheers,

Dan

[Neal Gompa]

On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 1:40 AM Dan Čermák
<dan.cermak(a)cgc-instruments.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hi Neal,
>
>  Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com&gt; writes:
>
>  > On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 12:44 PM Matthew Miller
>  > <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  >>
>  >> On Sun, May 09, 2021 at 12:32:00AM -0500, Greg Hellings wrote:
>  >> > I may be hair-brained to do this, but I've put together an installer
> for
>  >> > Fedora on WSL.
>  >>
>  >> Hi Greg! Not hair-brained at all -- this is awesome!
>  >>
>  >
>  > A couple of years back, I was working on porting WSL-DistroLauncher to
>  > be cross compiled with Fedora's MinGW stack. I stopped because of
>  > *reasons*, but it'd be nice to have the WSL stuff in Fedora and I
>  > could probably pick that back up and make it a package in Fedora for
>  > people to trivially generate their own WSL bundles.
>
>  Have you looked at openSUSE's patches:
>  https://github.com/openSUSE/WSL-DistroLauncher ? It works with their
>  MinGW stack, at the expense of adding autotools into the mix…
>  
I had not. It seems that their approach was to autotoolize the tree. I
was working on making it build with CMake, mostly because I was
intending to eliminate the Visual Studio solution files entirely in
favor of CMake and submit those upstream.



-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

[Susi Lehtola]

On 5/9/21 1:32 AM, Greg Hellings wrote:
>  I may be hair-brained to do this, but I've put together an
> installer for
>  Fedora on WSL.
>  
>  It mostly follows the procedures that had been much talked about in a
>  blog post about running Fedora 33 in the WSL2, but it uses the direct
>  installer rather than the manual side-loads. It also will install Fedora
>  34. Obviously, it's not released into the Windows Store as that requires
>  more than just some technical bit wrangling. But if you're feeling
>  adventurous, and you are sometimes relegated to the world of Windows but
>  want to bring your Fedora along, you can find it here:
>  https://github.com/greg-hellings/FedoraWSL
>  <https://github.com/greg-hellings/FedoraWSL> 
Thanks for doing this! It's great to have a free WSL installer for Fedora.

Unfortunately, the installer didn't work for me. Even though I installed
the security certificate as a trusted third-party root certificate,
Windows did not let me run the installation.

Has anyone gotten the installer to work? What were the necessary steps?
-- 
Susi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola(a)fedoraproject.org

[Greg Hellings]

Susi,

I've updated the repository in GitHub to allow issues to be followed.

How did you install the certificate? I had to go through some of the deep Windows
internals. Clicking the file and adding it directly wasn't enough, but my machine was
also the dev machine so there's lots of things that would be different. If you either
reply here or file an issue on the tracker, I can try to replicate what you've done in
a clean Windows VM.

--Greg