Tara Raj

What’s New for WSL in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

November 5th, 2018

On October 2, 2018, Microsoft announced that the availability of the** Windows 10 October 2018 Update**. After the update was paused, the rollout resumed on November 13, 2018. You can read more about the Windows 10 quality approach here. This post, however, will cover what you can expect to see in WSL for the October 2018 Update, Windows 10 ...

A Guide to Upgrading your Ubuntu App’s Release

July 9th, 2018

Canonical recently released Ubuntu 18.04 in the Microsoft Store. We received many questions around the various Ubuntu releases in the Store in addition to how best to upgrade your existing releases. With the help of our friends at Canonical, we have created a guide to upgrading your Ubuntu release. We will soon add a short-form version of this...

Windows Subsystem for Linux //Build 2018 Recap

May 15th, 2018

Last week, the WSL team attended Microsoft //Build 2018. We had a great time meeting many of you and answering questions at the command line booth. In case you missed it, you can watch out session, Set up a Windows Dev Environment that Feels Like $HOME, online on Channel9. In this post, we will summarize the NEW announcement we made during //...

Open Sourcing a WSL Sample for Linux Distribution Maintainers and Sideloading Custom Linux Distributions

March 26th, 2018

We are happy to announce that we have open sourced a WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) sample  for Linux distribution maintainers.  This sample allows distro maintainers to build WSL distro packages for the Microsoft Store and developers to create custom Linux distro packages for sideloading.  You can find the distro launcher repo on GitHub...

Debian GNU/Linux for WSL now available in the Windows Store

March 6th, 2018

We’re excited to announce that you can now download & install Debian GNU/Linux via the Windows Store! After we announced that you’d be able to install and run multiple distro’s side-by-side on WSL , we are happy to introduce another one of your favorite Linux distros to the Windows Store. As promised, we are expanding your ability ...

Kali Linux for WSL now available in the Windows Store

March 5th, 2018

We’re excited to announce that you can now download & install Kali Linux via the Windows Store! Our community expressed great interest in bringing Kali Linux to WSL in response to a blog post on Kali Linux on WSL. We are happy to officially introduce Kali Linux on WSL 😊. Introducing Kali Linux running on WSL: Background First...

Background Task Support in WSL

December 4th, 2017

Starting in Windows Insiders Build 17046, WSL supports background tasks (including daemons). In the past, if you opened WSL and started sshd, httpd, screen, or tmux  you needed to have a console window open to keep those tools running. But, starting with 17046, these processes will continue running in the background even after the last ...

What’s new in WSL in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

October 11th, 2017

Similarly to the Windows 10 Creators Update, the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU)  delivers a large number of improvements and features in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) . Note: For fans of our sister project, Windows Console, please also read our post on "What's New in Windows Console in FCU". We've been documenting many of ...