Linux Apps in Windows! - WSL Setup Guide

This video was sponsored by Linode. Use the  link down below for a $100 60 day credit. Hello,   every buddy this is TechHut what we're going to  be doing today is installing some native Linux   applications within Windows. And we're going  to be doing this by installing and enabling the   windows subsystem for Linux. What this is going  to do is provide a compatibility environment,   this lizard is freaking out and messing  up the audio. Its name is Henry, though.   Hi Henry. What this is going to do is provide a  compatibility environment that will allow us to   run both these Linux GUI applications Linux CLI  as well, and Windows applications side by side.   And once you've done that, what we're going to do  is go in and click on the Start menu. And then I'm   going to search up the terminal, right click Run  as administrator, and we're going to say yes, now   when you are in here, all we need to type in is 'wsl.exe --install'. And what this is going to do   is begin installing the windows subsystem for  Linux. And you can see what it's doing. It's   installing the virtual machine platform subsystem,  the WsL kernel, and the WsL kernel is how you're   going to kind of be able to interact with a  Linux kernel directly from your Windows system,   without even necessarily needing to be directly  in one of these virtual distributions. So the   changes will not be effective until the system is  rebooted. So what we're going to do is go ahead  

and close this out and reboot our system. And  while this reboots, this is a perfect time to   tell you about the sponsor of today's video.  Linode. Linode it is an absolutely wonderful   platform to host your Linux Web Services. I'm  currently using Linode to host techhut.tv,   a next cloud instance and any other web services  that I need. With Linux server starting as low as   $5 A month and a whole slew of easy one click  web installers. Linode is a fantastic option   to get all your services projects or whatever  you need up and running today. And better yet,   if you use the link down below, you can get $100  60 day credit to go ahead and play around with   Linode today. Alright, so we just rebooted  our system here. And the first thing that you   are going to see is this little boon to command  prompt, what we're going to want to do is create   our username and password for the Unix profile.  So this, I'm gonna go with Brandon. And then for   our password, just make sure it's something super  strong, complicated and secure. And there we go.   This is now Ubuntu. Let's see if we have top  installed you can see right here, what is going   on in this specific virtual environment. If I go  in and close out of here, I could always re access   this by opening this up searching for Ubuntu you  can see it as a separate app there. And here we   are, once again in Ubuntu. Now what I actually  want to do real quick is launch this through the   windows terminal. And if we open up this terminal  and go next, the tabs here hit the down arrow,  

we can actually open Ubuntu right here. So let's  open up that new Ubuntu instance. And now we   have this in our windows terminal. And then  just to check let's see if it has Neo fetch,   it does not so being that we are in Ubuntu,  we just do a sudo apt install Neo fetch,   hit enter type in our password. I forgot the very  most important thing with dealing with Ubuntu   is make sure you run a sudo apt update before  you do anything else. There we go. We have a   lot of packages available, but now we should be  able to get Neo fetch. Yep, there we go. Let's   install it. All right, now let's run Neofetch. And  we can see here we are running Ubuntu 20.04. lts,   this is the five point 10 kernel. And it's  seeing all my proper system specifications,   by default is giving us half of the total  amount of system RAM I currently have available.   Now one thing I want to do is show you guys  that using WsL, you can actually interact with   the Windows system, so I don't have to be in this  specific boon to terminal. If I go back over here   to the PowerShell. And let's say for example,  I wanted to print my current working directory,   that is PWD. I can hit enter you can see that  prints my current Windows directory, which is   C users and then my name. Now if I wanted to do  this as a Linux command, all I would do is W S L   So Windows subsystem for Linux. And then let's  print the current working directory. Hit enter   and you can see the directory looks a little bit  different. Instead of seeing my Windows location,   I'm actually seeing where I currently am from a  Unix standpoint. So this Windows File System is  

mounted with Unix as Mount C users and then my  name and because Linux is actually seeing this   mounted as a drive or a separate partition, it  is going to be really easy to interact with your   Linux system from Windows or interact with Windows  from your Linux system. And one thing real quick,   I want to backpedal a bit because there's other  Linux distributions that are just easily available   to install through this. When we ran the install  command just installed it file is the latest LTS   version of Ubuntu. But if we're interested  in seeing what we have available to us,   we just do ws L dash dash plus dash dash on line,  hit enter, and we can see all of the distributions   available to us. Now, let's say in addition to  Ubuntu, I also want a version of Debian or Debian   on here, I will do is WsL dash dash install, and  dash D for distribution and then the distribution   and in this case, I want to go ahead and grab  Debian. So let's hit enter. Now it's going to   go ahead and download that set it all up. And  now you can see a new terminal opened up over   here asking me to set up my Debian username  and password. So I'm just going to go with the   same thing over here username, make sure your  passwords moderately decent, and the installation   was successful. Now I could go in and close this  out, if I want to hit the down arrow once again.   Oh, first, we need to close the terminal. So  I'm gonna close this terminal out completely   Close all open up the windows terminal again. And  now if I bring this down here, I hit this little   down arrow, you'll see I have the option for both  Ubuntu and Debian. Now what I'm going to do is go  

back into our Ubuntu instance and try to install  and launch just a normal GUI application. So for   this, I'm just going to go ahead and grab G  at it. So let's do sudo apt install g edit,   which is a pretty simple text editor. Type in  our password, give that a quick install. Alright,   so now that that is done, finally installing every  single Linux package that has ever been compiled,   we're going to just type in G edit, hit enter.  And then there we go. This right here is G edit.   So you could type you could do whatever you would  normally do in G edit, open new tabs. And let's   go to this tab. If I wanted to save this, you  can see right now I am in the mount si users,   Brandon Hopkins, this is my Linux file system  right here. If I wanted to, I could go into home,   Brandon. And this is my actual home directory for  the Linux system. So that's just a little example   of a GUI application. And it has all the drivers  and everything. So if you open up a media player,   for example, the Linux system is going to have  access to your speakers, your microphones,   whatever it may be, the only times you may  run into issues is some unsupported like,   I'll show you an example real quick sudo apt  install Gimp. Alright, so that's installed. So if   I hit GIMP, open it up, we're going to get a whole  bunch of GTK issues here. But it's full GIMP, it's   going to perform very well, it's going to work  exactly as it should. So if I, for example, let's  

say we wanted to Filter, Render lava, this is one  of the more strenuous processes hit OK, it's going   to run through, do everything it needs to do and  it is done performance wise, it's there, it's very   good. So you can close this out Disregard Changes.  And since we opened it up through the terminal,   we could see all the different various errors and  whatnot that it had. But a really cool thing about   this, if I open up the Start menu here, you can  see a lot of the Linux stuff, we have the canoe   Image Manipulation Program. So it automatically  creates entries in our Start menu. So we can open   up Linux applications directly from Windows.  Now what I'm gonna do real quick is go over   to this window PowerShell terminal here and  tell you some of the other basic commands.   Now if you want to update WsL, it's simply  just update this whole update. But if you have   something that goes wrong, you could always add  the rollback suffix to this. So if you update,   something's not working, right, you could  always rollback your updates, we can completely   shut down all of our instances. So if I attempt  to shut down, that's what that would do. Now,   by default, the the Ubuntu distribution is going  to be the default distribution. But if you prefer   something else, you could always do set dash  default and then the name of the distro. So for   example, if I wanted to, I could type in Debian.  Additionally, there's other commands such as the   mount command, and then you'd put in whatever  you want them to mount. There is really a lot   that you can do with this and depending on  your applications, you can have like VS code   communicate with your Linux subsystem, and vice  versa. So real quick just to test I went ahead and  

installed Kate So if you want so you can open up  this application if this is something you prefer.   And just like with GIMP, if I type in  Kate, I could go ahead and launch this   through Ubuntu through my windows menu, some  super cool stuff. So that is a lot of what you   could do with the Windows subsystem for Linux,  there's a lot more you could do. So what I'm   going to do is link to some resources down below  including a list of all the possible commands all   the distros things like that. So that will  be down in the description as well as your   $100.60 day credit for Linode big thank you to our  YouTube members and patreon supporters you guys   are absolutely fantastic. Thank you personally  for watching this video. If you liked it subscribe   ring that bell so you don't miss future content  if you hated it, dislike it and Make sure you go   down below to tell me exactly why you disliked it  with all that have a beautiful day and good bye