Installing WSL2 on Windows 10

You will get performant access to the filesystem with WSL2!

2021-428-114 1 min read

From elevated PowerShell (Run as Administrator):

dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart

Now reboot.
Download and install the Linux kernel update package: https://wslstorestorage.blob.core.windows.net/wslblob/wsl_update_x64.msi
Set WSL 2 as your default version:

wsl --set-default-version 2

You’re basically done.

From Windows Store do a search for WSL. A bunch of distros will come up - I went for Ubuntu 20.04 as the simplest to manage.

You don’t have to install the distro from the Windows Store though! For example, here’s a gist covering how to run Arch on WSL2: https://gist.github.com/chhh/8458a41de99d9127c3364b5f3561a6e2

Instructions taken from: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Principal Bioinformatics Scientist

My main research interests are data visualization and signal processing for mass spectrometry.