Before starting this process, my machine was running WSL 1. These are the steps I took to install and to start using WSL 2 side-by-side with WSL 1.
Install Windows 10 build 18917 or higher. This requires running Windows Update after joining the Windows Insider Program.
Restart the computer.
Enable the Virtual Machine Platform optional component:
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart
Restart the computer.
Switch an existing, installed Linux distribution from WSL 1 to WSL 2. (We can later reverse this, if we want to, by running the command with a
1
instead of a
2
.)
# list installed distributions
wsl --list
# set an existing, installed distribution to use WSL 2
wsl --set-version Ubuntu 2
# check that the version switch worked
wsl --list --verbose
Test that it worked by pressing
Windows
+
R
and typing
Ubuntu
. A bash terminal will open. Try navigating to
cd /
and then typing
ls -la
to see the Linux root directory.
If you're using ConEmu, change
Startup > Tasks > {Bash::bash}
to
wsl.exe ~
to make ConEmu's Bash command open to WSL at the user's directory. See also
https://github.com/Maximus5/ConEmu/issues/1930
References
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-index
Title photo by Charles J Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54619646