By Ben Lopez
January 26, 2023
I know a lot of students are familiar with the VS Code/WSL pairing from past classes like 121, 221, etc, so recommending that would be cool. To support that, this link from Microsoft would be useful.
If you want to just include the information directly, the way to
install WSL is simply wsl --install in Powershell. Then,
you can follow your instructions for Linux and the run with Makefile
directly.
If someone already has WSL, then they need to do a few more things.
First, check that they have WSL2 (full Linux kernel VM version) by doing
wsl -l -v which will print something like
If they’re running 2, they only need to perform
wsl --update in Powershell, and then
wsl --shutdown to restart the VM. If they’re running 1,
then first they need to move to version 2 by performing
wsl --set-version <distro name from above> 2. This
will take a while, and then they follow the update and restart
instruction above. Last step here would be to perform
sudo apt update to be sure everything is up to date.
To test that the GUI support is working, I installed and ran gedit.
sudo apt-get install gedit -y and then ran
gedit ~/.bashrc and it brought up a normal looking
window:
Then, following the run with Makefile instructions in Lab \(0\) allowed me to run it which looked fine:
Hope this helps and can streamline development for those wishing to use a simple editor like VS Code!