Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

Hi fellow WSL folks. I wanted to provide some updates for those of you who still want to run Fedora on your Windows Subsystem install. My aim here is to enable kind/minikube/k3d so you can run kubernetes and to do that, you need to enable systemd.

How do you run your own WSL image you ask? Well if you are a RedHat lover like I am, you can use the current Fedora Cloud image in just a few steps. All you need is the base filesystem to get started. I will demonstrate how I setup my WSL2 image (this presupposes that you have configured your Windows Subsystem already).

First, lets start by downloading your container image. Depending what tools you have, you need to obtain the root filesystem. You may now need to uncompress the files. Either you downloaded a raw fil that was compressed using xz, tar.gz or some other compression tooling. What we want to do is get at the filesystem. Look for the rootfs file. The key is to extract the layer.tar file that consists of the filesystem. I used the Fedora Container Base image from here (https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=26387). Once downloaded, you can extract the tar file and then you can extract the layer (random folder name) to get at the layer.tar file.

Then you can import your Fedora Linux for WSL using this command line example

wsl –import Fedora c:\Tools\WSL\fedora Downloads\layer.tar

wsl.exe               (usually in your path)

–import             (parameter to import your tarfile)

‘Fedora’              (the name I give it in ‘wsl -l -v’)

‘C:\Tools\WSL’   (the path where I will keep the filesystem)

‘Downloads\…’  (the path where I have my tar file)

If you were successful, you should be able to start your wsl linux using the following command

wsl -d Fedora

(Here I am root and attempt to update the OS using dnf.

dnf update

Fedora 38 – x86_64                                                   2.4 MB/s |  83 MB     00:34

Fedora 38 openh264 (From Cisco) – x86_64          2.7 kB/s   | 2.5 kB      00:00

Fedora Modular 38 – x86_64                                    2.9 MB/s | 2.8 MB     00:00

Fedora 38 – x86_64 – Updates                                  6.8 MB/s |  24 MB     00:03

Fedora Modular 38 – x86_64 – Updates                  1.0 MB/s | 2.1 MB     00:02

Dependencies resolved.

Nothing to do.

Complete!

You must install systemd now to add all of the components

dnf install systemd

The last part included activating systemd in WSL. Add a file called /etc/wsl.conf and add the following

[boot]

systemd=true

That is all of the preparation, now you can restart the OS and you should check to verify if your systemd is working.

systemctl