Last summer when microsoft released ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux’ (WSL), It created huge impact over developer community, who was familiar with BASH in LINUX. But, Still it was incomplete. That’s why it was released as ‘Beta’.
WSL & Console engineering teams worked on lots of fixes, suggestions and feedbacks to improve the WSL/BASH over last 12+ months and finally removed ‘Beta’ from WSL.
Key features of WSL are:
Capabilities
- Core tools: apt, sed, grep, awk, top, tmux, ssh, scp, etc.
- Shells: Bash, zsh, fish, etc.
- Dev tools: vim, emacs, nano, git, gdb, etc.
- Languages & platforms: Node.js & npm, Ruby & Gems, Java & Maven, Python & Pip, C/C++, C# & .NET Core & Nuget, Go, Rust, Haskell, Elixir/Erlang, etc.
- Systems & Services: sshd, Apache, lighttpd, nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL
- And many, MANY others!
Ubuntu 16.04 Support
While windows 10 Anniversary update released with Ubuntu 14.04, Now Creator Update comes with Ubuntu 16.04. To know your ubuntu version run below command
|
$ lsb_release -a |
If, you are on Ubuntu 14.04 in WSL, it will not upgraded automatically to 16.04, You can upgrade it by two ways:
- Remove & Replace (recommended)
| C:\> lxrun /uninstall /full /y … C:\> lxrun /install |
- Upgrade In-Place
- If your Ubuntu instance is particularly complex to configure, you can opt to upgrade it in-place, though this may not result in an optimal instance.
- If you opt to upgrade your instance in-place, use Ubuntu’s instructions for upgrading an existing instance:
| $ sudo do-release-upgrade |
Ifconfig & network connection enumeration support
you can use ifconfig to enumerate and examine the configuration of your available
network adapters in CU.
Ping & ICMP network support
There was an issue with AU that, Non admin user can not run ping, in CU it has been fixed.
File change notification support (INOTIFY)
If you were working on a node.js website project, editing your source in vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, VS Code, etc., whenever you save your code, you might want your website server to reload your newly changed page source so that you can refresh your browser and see your changes reflected immediately.
WSL supports inotify which allows apps to register for filesystem change notifications, which can then trigger actions, like rebuilding a project, or restarting a local web server. This works for both DrvFS and internal LXFs locations.
Windows <-> Linux Interop
In Windows 10 Creators Update, you can now launch Windows apps & tools from within Bash
The list is not finished yet, But many more has been done and many more are lined up.
