in reply to What's happening with the Cygwin project?

I've got a lot of learning-curve time invested in cygwin, but I had been intrigued by the claimed capabilities of WSL and I am not sorry that the topic in later nodes switched tracks a bit. I have one question about WSL at the moment: how does the installing of binary Linux packages work? Is there something like a "WSL package manager" or has WSL adopted something from Redhat, Debian or similar?

Withe respect, thanks good monks!

Oct 25, 2024 at 20:15 UTC

The open palm of desire
Wants everything, it wants everything
It wants soil as soft as summer
And the strength to push like spring
Paul Simon -> Further to Fly

  • Comment on Re: What's happening with the Cygwin project?

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Re^2: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by SankoR (Prior) on Oct 25, 2024 at 21:32 UTC

    All of that is up to you. You first decide which flavor of Linux to install (I keep a clean arch dist and a messy Debian for dev) and to install software, you just use the appropriate package manager for that OS.

    Here's the current list of distributions directly managed and provided by Microsoft (wsl --list --online): 

    The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed.
Install using 'wsl.exe --install <Distro>'.

NAME                            FRIENDLY NAME
Ubuntu                          Ubuntu
Debian                          Debian GNU/Linux
kali-linux                      Kali Linux Rolling
Ubuntu-18.04                    Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu-20.04                    Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu-22.04                    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Ubuntu-24.04                    Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
OracleLinux_7_9                 Oracle Linux 7.9
OracleLinux_8_7                 Oracle Linux 8.7
OracleLinux_9_1                 Oracle Linux 9.1
openSUSE-Leap-15.6              openSUSE Leap 15.6
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP5    SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP6    SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP6
openSUSE-Tumbleweed             openSUSE Tumbleweed

    See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install for the basics. You can install multiple distros and there's a ton of user created distributions on github and elsewhere with preinstalled software if you're unfamiliar with Linux and don't know where to begin.

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[d/l]
Re^2: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by jo37 (Curate) on Oct 25, 2024 at 21:25 UTC
    how does the installing of binary Linux packages work?

    You choose one (or more) distibutions from a list including Debian, Ubuntu and others and are given a virtual environment with the selected flavour(s). Afterwards you use the native package management of your distribution. It's a VM, but you don't need to care about it. Starting a terminal emulation from the Windows menu will fire up the VM. Yes: Linux applications appear inside the Windows menu.

    Greetings,
    🐻

    $gryYup$d0ylprbpriprrYpkJl2xyl~rzg??P~5lp2hyl0p$
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Re^2: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by haj (Vicar) on Oct 25, 2024 at 21:26 UTC

    I am using an "Ubuntu" flavor of WSL on a Win11 Laptop because it seems to be the default (other distributions exist). I install binary packages as usual on Debian/Ubuntu systems with apt-get or synaptic. So far without any issues.

    I also have been using Cygwin quite a lot in the past, but it seems that I won't need it any more.

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