In late 2022 a new way of <ahref="https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/23/wsl_microsoft_store_default_version/">
installing and using WSL</a> was announced and this page has been revised to match. <ahref="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versions?source=recommendations">WSL2 is now noticeably even slower</a> for NTFS files, so now it is only really useable if you move all the troggle code into your Linux filespace on <var>\\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu-22.04\home</var> which means that those files will only be accesible from Linux. Buggeration. If you have to use NTFS for those files for some other reason, you would need to revert to using WSL1.
This may be fine: the behaviour is nearly identical so far as an expo laptop is concerned, where you just want to use rsync and scp. An old 2011-era PC had
been doing troggle development happily using WSL1. However time is clearly running out for WSL1, and the file handling is now very noticably slower. If your laptop won't run WSL2 then you are advised to get rid of Windows completely and install Xubuntu as a dual boot system.
<p>For some laptops though, WSL1 does not install properly and you have to use WSL2. The symptom is two error messages when you run <var>dmesg</var> in
the Linux bash terminal window. However, if all you want to use it for is rsync, this may still be fine.
'network' method <var>\\wsl$\Ubuntu-20.04\home\expo\troggle\</var>. This means that file access is noticably faster too. You will need to make sure that your backup/archive methods access this filesystem though.
permissions managed by the filesystem. Every NTFS file that WSL knows about (if mounted with -o metadata) acquires a completely parallel set of file
permissions that are fundamentally different things and are never in sync in any sense. <a
href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/chmod-chown-wsl-improvements/">All sorts of fun</a> results. The alternative is to store all your data
in the \\wsl$\ ext4 filesystem (WSL2 only, not WSL1).
<p>If you are disturbed by the instructions to produce an entirely different SSL key for WSL to use when your PC already has a perfectly good PuTTy key installed on the server, then you are right. It is inelegant. But it works, the instructions are shorter and there are fewer things that go wrong. If you are terribly offended by that then you can set your PC up to use one key shared between WSL and normal-Windows as described in <ahref="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/sharing-ssh-keys-between-windows-and-wsl-2/">this October 2019 article</a>. (Don't set up a password on the key because then you don't need to install keychain.) But beware, this sort of thing goes out of date quite rapidly.
<p>If you have PuTTY installed and working, but you now want to use WSL rsync, you need to set up a key again within the WSL environment.
<p>[ Now that Microsoft allows installation of OpenSSL using <ahref="">standard Windows tools</a> on Windows 10 and 11, we need someone to revise all the Windows/troggle documentation for a PuTty-free route. Volunteers? ]
<p> So on a machine with WSL enabled, create an ordinary cmd window and get into the WSL environment using the wsl command:<br/>
The generated key is in the current directory and you need to move them to ~/.ssh/ as is standard on Linux (which is not at all the same place that puTTY uses to keep keys on Windows).
<p>Now you have to complete the <ahref="keyexchange.html">key-pair setup</a> with the new key "id_ras_wsl.pub". But you don't need anyone else's help this time as you can use puTTY to ssh into the server and copy your key to the right place yourself: it is a <ahref="keyexchange.html#secondmachine">"Second Machine"</a>.
<p>
Now finally you can use all the usual command line tools at yor wsl command line to communicate with the server with ssh, scp, rsync, such as:
<p>Having happily used WSL1 in this manner for a couple of years, it was a rude awakening to try this with a new laptop with a small
hard-drive, so all the expo code was re-mounted on a plugged-in SD card. The problem of permissions that seemed to be a WSL2 issue reappeared with
a vengence on WSL1.
<p>The recommended WSL procedure (Jan.2021) said to mount the drive using
<ahref="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/chmod-chown-wsl-improvements/">a new 'metadata' setting</a>:
<pre><code>sudo umount /mnt/d
sudo mount -t drvfs D: /mnt/d -o metadata,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=22,fmask=111</code></pre>
<p>This is probably why there is a difference between automatically-mounted drives (e.g. C:, /mnt/c) and plug-in drives:
"<em>By default, WSL will set the uid and gid to the default user with drives that are auto-mounted during instance start. If you mount manually, you will
have to set these explicitly (the default user that gets created when WSL is first installed has a uid=1000 and gid=1000).</em>"
<p>And of course you will need to arrange that this happens automatically whenever you start WSL, so you will need to set
<ahref="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab"><var>/etc/fstab</var></a>, so ensure that the relevant line says:
<li><ahref="https://www.hanselman.com/blog/CoolWSLWindowsSubsystemForLinuxTipsAndTricksYouOrIDidntKnowWerePossible.aspx">Cool WSL tricks</a> - running Windows commands from WSL environment and running Linux commands from Windows terminal.
<li><ahref="https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/09/03/wsl2">deep integration</a> - Don't use gitforwindows, install the linux git client in WSL2
<li><ahref="https://blog.anaisbetts.org/using-github-credentials-in-wsl2/">using-github-credentials-in-wsl2</a> - How to use gitforwindows and WSL to connect to GitHub.
</ul>
<p>When things go wrong when trying to sort this out, you may find these pages useful. I did.
<tt><ahref="https://serverfault.com/questions/423075/rsync-failed-to-set-permission-operation-not-permitted">rsync - failed to set permission - operation not permitted</a></tt>
<p>WSL2 installs python by default, but it may be a rather old python (depending on the history of your laptop, phase of moon etc.) and if you want development speed you want python3.11. [NB check what version of python is running on the server. It was 3.11.2 in April 2024.]
<p>To install python3.11 and pip follow <ahref="https://www.linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-python-3-11-on-ubuntu-linux/">these instructions</a> to the letter. But that's not enough, you need to configure pip to work properly with python3.11 (this is because it's a bit bleeding edge as yet), so you ALSO then need to re-install the latest with:
