Enable GUIs on Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL)

So this post started off with me getting GUI apps running on my Windows WSL install of Pengwin, but has now turned into doing it without the need to fork over the readies for Pengwin as now you can do it with Ubuntu or Debian (possibly others) which are free to download on the Microsoft store.

Pengwin is a pretty powerful Linux distro based off of Debian you can pick it up in the Windows store for £16.74 if you want all the additional features it offers up. I’d suggest keeping and eye on it because they regularly do discounts on it too.

I say this started off using Pengwin, because I used all the setup options to enable GUI usage on there but (like most of my WSL instances) I trashed the install and couldn’t recreate what I had done before. This post stayed shelved since the start of October but now I’m picking it up again thanks to Nicky Meuleman’s guide on Using Graphical User Interfaces like Cypress’ in WSL2 and his other post on Linux on windows WSL2 ZSH Docker that post also spawned the last post I did on my Notes on Zsh and Oh My Zsh with the great section he did on setting up Zsh.

So, what am I doing in this post? Ripping off Nicky’s content? Pretty much!

I’ll be adding content from Nicky’s posts here along with my own take on things. I have several bits of content I have to gather up each time I want to do this (I’ve done it several times now) so this will be a complete list for my use case.

I’ll be doing this with a fresh install of Debian from the Windows store, this was me wanting to understand if I could do it using Debian as well as with Ubuntu more than anything else.

I can confirm it works with Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 as well as Debian, the version of Debian I’m using is Debian GNU/Linux 10, if you want to check your version use cat /etc/issue in the terminal.

Again massive thanks to Nick Meuleman for his awesome content on this.

Tl;Dr

If you prefer to watch how this is done then skip all the way to the end for a video detailing the process. 🚀

Why GUI apps though?

Ok, so first up why do I want to be able to run GUIs (Graphical User Interface) on my Linux instances?

Solely for testing software like Cypress, QA Wolf and browser automation tools Microsoft’s Playwright; these all need to run from the WSL instance which isn’t set up by default to run GUIs.

There is talk of the WSL team Adding Linux GUI app support to WSL but this is slated for an update in the holidays (Christmas??).

I’m not going to hold my breath for this to go into the main release of Windows 10 I’d hazard a guess that it’ll be available Spring/Summer release.

If you absolutely must have this functionality yourself then I’d suggest giving Windows insiders a try. I’ve been on Windows insiders in the past and would prefer to stay on the normal release schedule for now.

There’s a some things I’ll need up front, an X-server I already have X410 which I got on offer from the Windows store, it retails around £8.39.

Check out Nicky’s blog on getting set up with VcXsrv if you’re not going to hand over the cash for X410. There’s an important note on the additional settings needed for that on Nicky’s post.

If you don’t have WSL set up already then check out Nicky’s post on it, I’ve also made a post on when I initially set up my machine to use WSL in the summer.

Debian install and config

First up I’ll need to download and install the Debian app, this will open up the Debian command line and prompt me to enter a username and password.

I’ll then need to change this from WSL to WSL2 via a Powershell admin panel (Windows Key+x, then a) as it’s fresh from the store it’ll be on version 1.

To list out my WSL instances I’ll use the wsl -l -v command:

1# the l is for list
2# v is for verbose 🤷‍♀️
3# this is the long version => wsl --list --verbose
4PS C:\Windows\system32> wsl -l -v
5  NAME            STATE           VERSION
6* Ubuntu          Running         2
7  Ubuntu-16.04    Stopped         2
8  WLinux          Stopped         2
9  Debian          Running         1
10  Ubuntu-20.04    Running         2
11  Ubuntu-18.04    Stopped         2

That lists out what I have installed, see that Debian is version 1, I’ll use the wsl command in Powershell to set it to version 2, it’ll show some output and let you know when it’s done it’s thing:

1wsl --set-version Debian 2
2# PS C:\Windows\system32> wsl --set-version Debian 2
3# Conversion in progress, this may take a few minutes...
4# For information on key differences with WSL 2 please visit https://aka.ms/wsl2
5# Conversion complete.

Now that is out of the way I can open the Debian shell on my Windows Terminal app and work in there from here on out.

Update Debian

Update all the things, a word of warning if you’re copy pasting these commands I have the -y flag set in these which agrees to install without prompting first, you’ve been warned 😛:

First update all the things:

1sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -y

Then to add the missing libraries and utilities and packages I’ll need build-essential, git and curl:

1sudo apt install build-essential git curl -y

Install Zsh and Oh My Zsh

For this guide I’m going to concentrate on getting up and running with the GUI goodness. So I’m going to forgo adding anything fancy to Zsh other than Oh My Zsh.

If you’re interested in configuring Zsh a bit more then check out the Notes on Zsh and Oh My Zsh post I made which covers a fair bit of customisation.

1# Install zsh
2sudo apt install zsh -y
3# set Zsh to default shell
4chsh -s $(which zsh)
5# add Oh My Zsh
6sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Oh My Zsh will prompt to be set as the default shell to which I’ll answer why yes.

The `.zshrc` file

Oh My Zsh uses the .zshrc file for configuration, it can be accessed in the $HOME directory, I will be editing it a fair bit from now on with Nano:

1nano ~/.zshrc

To exit out of Nano Ctrl+o to write out the changes, Enter to confirm changes then Ctrl+x to close.

Install nvm

Install nvm for that quick change node versions goodness, this isn’t essential but comes in handy if you need to change node versions.

1curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | zsh
2command -v nvm
3# sets default to 14
4nvm install 14
5# nvm alias default 14

The first node install is what is set to the default, if you change versions later and want to default to a different version use nvm alias default 15.

Install Yarn

I’m installing yarn as a preference and also because I know the repository I’m going to test with Cypress uses Yarn as well.

These instructions are taken from the Yarn install docs:

1curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
2echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
3sudo apt update && sudo apt install yarn -y

Add starting directory

All the Linux distros I use start in the Windows C drive for some reason at /mnt/c/Users/username.

It can be really easy to start creating projects there but because it’s on the Windows file system, running projects from there will be a lot slower than running them from the native partition.

1# cd to the home directory
2~
3# Open the zshrc file
4nano ~/.zshrc
5# add this at the bottom
6cd ~/repos

Add SSH keys

Because I like to trash my Linux installs on a regular basis I have a set of SSH keys I move from install to install. I recently discovered the explorer.exe which allows you to access the Linux files in the Windows file explorer! This is really handy and means I haven’t got to simlink them anymore!! 🚀

I’ll pop open my Debian instance and copy pasta the SSH files in there:

1explorer.exe .

Because I’ve pasted them in from a Windows file system I’ll need to set the correct permissions on the files, then I’ll authenticate with GitHub.

1# change to the .ssh folder
2~/.ssh/
3sudo chmod 644 id_rsa.pub
4sudo chmod 600 id_rsa
5sudo chmod 644 known_hosts
6# change out to set the folder permissions
7../
8sudo chmod 700 .ssh/
9# authenticate with GitHub
10ssh -T git@github.com

GUI things

This is where Nicky’s detailed posts come in, the dependencies here are what’s needed to get the GUI stuff going:

1sudo apt install \
2  libgtk-3-dev \
3  libnotify-dev \
4  libgconf-2-4 \
5  libnss3 \
6  libxss1 \
7  libasound2 -y

ℹ If you’re using Playwright there’s a few additional dependencies tha need installing for WebKit, this was from using with Ubuntu.

1sudo apt install \
2  libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-0 \
3  libenchant1c2a \
4  gstreamer1.0-libav -y

For the GUI apps to connect to my X-server I’ll need to create a DISPLAY environment variable in my .zshrc config file.

Pop open the file with my terminal text editor of choice, Nano:

1nano ~/.zshrc

Then add in the variable, when I have attempted this in the past the variable was literally 0.0 so this from Nicky is a nice expansion on that and he explains brilliantly why this needs to be done:

1# set DISPLAY variable to the IP automatically assigned to WSL2
2export DISPLAY=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{print $2; exit;}'):0.0

To exit out of Nano Ctrl+o to write out the changes, Enter to confirm then Ctrl+x to close.

To confirm that it works I can open a new terminal or use source ~/.zshrc then print out the DISPLAY variable:

1source ~/.zshrc
2echo $DISPLAY

`dbus` start and access

D-Bus is ued by Linux desktop environments for GUI apps so I’m going to need that and the following will automatically start it.

Pop open the .zshrc file again:

1# open the zzh config file
2nano ~/.zshrc

Add the below snippet to the end of the .zshrc file:

1# Automatically start dbus
2sudo /etc/init.d/dbus start &> /dev/null

To exit out of Nano Ctrl+o to write out the changes, Enter to confirm then Ctrl+x to close.

I’ll need to create a sudoers file to grant passwordless access for dbus, the following command will open that file (or create it if it doesn’t exist already), in there I need to give no password access to dbus:

1# open or create the sudoers file for dbus
2sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/dbus

In Nano add in my username, and this:

1scott ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/dbus

Again,to exit out of Nano Ctrl+o to write out the changes, Enter to confirm then Ctrl+x to close.

Clone a repo that uses Cypress

I know that MDX Embed uses Cypress because I participated in adding tests to it for Hacktoberfest.

I’m going to clone that:

1git clone git@github.com:PaulieScanlon/mdx-embed.git

Wait for that to do it’s thing! ⏲

Then time to test!

1yarn cy:test

Boom! GUI running in WSL!!