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Automated Alpine Linux Setup in WSL2#

Recently, I got quite frustrated with the bloated WSL Distros that are shipped by Canonical and Debian Team. It comes preinstalled with Systemd, a horribly old version of Python and for some reason insists that vim depends on sound drivers and sound themes from freedesktop.org

Having no intention of trusting Microsoft store again, I create my own WSL distro in 3 simple setups:

  1. Get the latest minirootfs for your architecture from Alpine Downloads Page. Verify the sha256sum and gpg signatures.
  2. Run the WSL import command: 
    $ wsl --import MyCustomDistro C:\Directory\For\Custom\WSL .\alpine.tar.gz
$ wsl -d MyCustomDistro

  3. Create symlinks to useful Windows binaries like C:\Windows\explorer.exe or VS Code to somewhere in your WSL $PATH variable, if you want to invoke them from within the WSL environment. You can also customize further, as I did on my previous post. Or copy the PATH environment from an existing "official" distro and add it to your /etc/profile.

    $ ln -s /usr/bin/code /mnt/c/Users/r/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft VS Code/bin/code
$ ln -s /usr/bin/explorer.exe /mnt/c/Windows/explorer.exe
    Here's a reference video if you prefer videos over articles: {{< youtube U4I1VDsKD9g >}}

The rootfs is less than 3MiB and the installation takes only 77MiB of disk space. Meaning that there's not much unwanted/outdated library, driver, userland utilities to deal with.