It’s been over 25 years I have been working in Microsoft environments from MS-DOS 3.X to present-day Windows 10 and never I have even dreamt this will happen. Included with the release of Windows 10 Anniversary update is a Ubuntu Linux subsystem for Windows. Yes, you read it right.
To get Bash shell working in Ubuntu on Windows subsystem you follow these steps:
- Ensure you have Windows 10 Build 14393 or later
- Enable “Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta)” in Windows Features screen which can be accessed from Add or Remove Programs
- In Settings->Update & Security->For developers screen, enable “Developer mode” option under “Use developer features”
- Go to cmd prompt, run bash command which will prompt you to install “Ubuntu on Windows”
- Once UoW is installed, it will prompt you to create a user and password in UNIX subsystem
If everything is installed properly, you will be able to run bash commands in Windows. Even access Windows filesystem from Unix. Awesome!
Some tips:
- To install a package from Ubuntu package repository, say a text web browser like w3m, use the following command:
sudo apt-get install w3m
- To install Python language tools, use the following command:
sudo apt install python3 python3-pip ipython3
To make Python3 as the default interpreter, open the bashrc file with nano editor:
nano ~/.bashrc
At the top of the bashrc file, add the following lines:
alias python=python3 alias pip=pip3
Exit and save the bashrc file. Then run the below command:
source ~/.bashrc
- If you are getting an error when trying to install a package using apt-get, update the package cache by the following command:
sudo apt-get update
- To search for a package, try the following with the package name you are looking:
apt-cache search packagename
You can learn from this article on how to install Linux app packages in Ubuntu subsystem and see a demo video on how to use Bash in Windows. This article from Dustin Kirkland briefly talks on how this all works!