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Setting up Arch Linux with KDE Plasma in Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Rashil Gandhi on December 11, 2020

Yup, you read that right. Sounds crazy, I know. But entirely possible, and surprisingly usable. Pretty easy too. Enabling Windows Subsys...
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Pololot64

I am hoping to add PulseAudio support to GWSL sometime in the future. It depends on business and demand ;)

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Rashil Gandhi

Hey! Thanks for your efforts on GWSL! It feels good when utility authors themselves participate in such discussions :)

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Pololot64

I had fun making it! :) I had no idea that this had any coverage anywhere. Thanks for writing about it! It is good to know it is working for people. I only see download stats and get very little feedback (compared to the number of installs) so it is good to see tutorials that use it. Now I want to try to get KDE working haha.

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Steve Brown

Hey hey - I've also posted an article about how to use GWSL to run KDE on Artix on WSL2 ( No SystemD ). Pulseaudio support would be outstanding.

Also, is there any way to use WSL2's ssh (or Windows OpenSSH?) instead of PuTTY for remote SSH? All my servers use Public/Private Key Authentication and that's just a right royal pain with PuTTY :)

Fabulous project though - thanks for it!

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Pololot64 • Edited

I have not done it but with other SSH tools but it shouldn't be a problem. You just need to forward the remote display to GWSL's display. I do not know how off the top of my head though. And glad you like it!

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Pololot64

And GWSL 1.3.8 is out with audio support :)

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Rashil Gandhi

Wow that's amazing. Can't wait to try it out!

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mailinglists35

is there any way you could run the pulseaudio without the microphone icon popping up in system tray?

I am used to not see it unless an app absolutely needs to use the microphone right now.

it seems that the pulseaudio server triggers the microphone icon permanently.

maybe dynamically be able to restart pulseaudio daemon in two configuration modes, one with microphone and in one without it, user selectable from GUI config of the app? I don't think I need pulseaudio to permanently hook the microphone device, even if it actually does not make use of it.

a major drawback of current state is that I would miss real microphone notification if some other app actually wants to use the microphone.

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mailinglists35

when only one app is using the microphone, when you hover the mouse it tells the name of the app. when 2 apps are using, it only tells "2 apps are using", which requires extra clicks to see exactly which ones are listed in the settings app

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mailinglists35

I tried like this unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2...

$ pactl unload-module 7
shared memfd open() failed: Function not implemented

"pactl list" relevant module:

Module #7
Name: module-waveout
Argument: sink_name=output source_name=input record=0
Usage counter: 0
Properties:
module.author = "Pierre Ossman"
module.description = "Windows waveOut Sink/Source"
module.version = "1.1"

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mailinglists35

the same error with

$ sudo pactl suspend-source 2 true
shared memfd open() failed: Function not implemented
Failure: No such entity

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

on a 10-year-old PC, a modern gaming laptop and a current-gen Macbook (through Bootcamp).

I am more interested in, what are your hardware specs? I am have MacBook Air 2012, with replaced SSD harddisk and 8 GB RAM.

My latest complaint is, VirtualBox performance is damn bad; and WSL2 is damn RAM hogging.

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Rashil Gandhi • Edited

My PC has a 2nd Gen Intel i3 processor and 4 GB RAM. WSL does consume a lot of RAM, but I haven't noticed any performance impacts on other apps running alongside. Even WSL runs buttery-smooth for me.

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ati46

I saw that 127.0.0.1 is used as the link address in the tutorial. This method is possible in wsl1, but I can’t implement it on wsl2. I can only use export DISPLAY=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk'{print $2; exit;}'):0.0 Get the ip of wsl2 dynamically. And the link will be broken every time the wifi is changed or disconnected. Can you explain how to use 127.0.0.1 in wsl2?

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Rashil Gandhi

You can't use 127.0.0.1. WSL2 is no longer running natively (i.e. through translation). It's a virtual machine now. So it'll function the same as a VM; it'll have it's own network interfaces separate from those of Windows.