Installing Linux on Windows 10

by Jan 15, 2019

Windows 10 comes with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature that you can use to run various Linux distributions. Launch a PowerShell with elevated privileges to enable the WSL:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux -Online  

Next, open the Microsoft Store on Windows 10, and search for “Linux”. Install one of the supported Linux distros (for example, Debian)!

That is all that is required. You can now open Debian from within PowerShell or via the start menu. Simply run the “Debian” command. When you do this for the first time, you’ll have to define a root account and password.

As you probably know, PowerShell 6 is platform independent and runs on Linux too. If you wanted to use your new Debian environment to also test-drive PowerShell 6 on Linux, run the following commands from within your Debian console:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl apt-transport-https
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/microsoft-debian-stretch-prod stretch main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft.list'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y powershell
pwsh

Next, from within Debian, run the “pwsh” command to switch to PowerShell 6.


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