Official Assemblies Of Fedora, Almalinux And Arch Linux For WSL Were Published

Microsoft announced about the formation of official fedora linux for fedora WSL subsystems (Windows Subsystem for Linux). At the end of April, similar assemblies began to be published for arch Linux and almalinux . For Arch Linux, such assemblies are planned to be updated once a month, and for the rest as new releases release.

assemblies with Fedora, Almalinux and Arch Linux are included in the WSL List linux devices offered for quick installation in WSL. Of other distributions, the list of WSL includes Debian Gnu/Linux, Ubuntu, Opensuse Leap, Opensuse Tumblewhed, Suse Linux Enterprise, Kali Linux and Oracle Linux. To install assemblies, it is enough to execute the “WSL –Install distribution” command in Windows, for example, “WSL –Install Fedoralinux-42”, “WSL –install Archlinux” or “WSL –install almalinux-9.”

The assembly are formed in new format , which allows to distribute distribution from their servers without loading to the Microsoft Store catalog, without packaging in format appx and without placement in the assembly code specific to Windows. The new method is reduced to the placement of a TAR archive with a systemic environment of a distribution and a /etc/wsl-distribution.conffile file containing metadata, such as the name, icon, the user identifier and scripts for configuration of the environment performed at the first launch.

WSL provides a virtual machine with a full-fledged Linux nucleus (based on Vestok 6.6 or 5.15), which can be launched by the distributions specially adapted for WSL Linux. The core includes specific changes for WSL, such as optimization to reduce the time of starting and reduce memory consumption, the ability to return Windows to be released by Linux memory processes and settings to exclude extra drivers and subsystems. The system is installed in a separate disk image (VHD) with the Ext4 file system and virtual network adapter.