WSL is a great product of Microsoft. You can have a linux develop environment on your windows machine via WSL. But the official WSL distribution is a little old. For example, currently, the latest official WSL distribution of Ubuntu is 18.04 and the official Ubuntu release is 19.10. Ubuntu 20.04 is coming even.
I want to try the latest Ubuntu 20.04 on windows, so I have to build a WSL distribution by myself. In order to archive this goal, I need find a Ubuntu 20.04 distribution as a basement. I notice there is an Ubuntu 20.04 docker image. Docker image is a workable minimal system. It is a good basement.
Run the following command to pull an Ubuntu 20.04 docker image:
docker pull ubuntu:20.04
Then launch the image:
docker run -t -i ubuntu:20.04
You should see the prompt in your command window, it likes:
root is the current username logged in the docker image, e09e3.... is the current docker container ID. It is
generated randomly by docker runner. This ID is useful, we will use it later.
Docker image doesn't have sudo installed, let's install it:
apt update && apt install sudo
Now, let's create the install package for WSL:
cd /
tar czf install.tar.gz *
OK, the package is ready, let's exit the docker container and copy the package to local (remember replace e09e3.... with your container ID):
exit
docker cp e09e39085a63:/install.tar.gz .
Create a folder to host the new WSL distribution, copy the package into the folder:
md ubuntu-20.04
copy install.tar.gz ubuntu-20.04
Download the launcher from https://github.com/xieyubo/WSL-DistroLauncher/releases/download/10b787c/ubuntu18.04.exe to that folder. You can also
change the launcher name to ubuntu20.04.exe if you like. Now, the folder should be looks like:
Double click ubuntu28.04.exe, that's all!