Void Linux on WSL

In this short post, I want to go over how to install Void Linux on WSL.

Pre-requisites

• WSL installed (docs here)
• A Powershell terminal session (or another wsl distro if you’d rather invoke wsl.exe that way)

Installation

First, download the latest Void Linux rootfs tarball from here.

$ mkdir void-install
$ cd void-install
$ wget https://repo-default.voidlinux.org/live/current/void-x86_64-musl-ROOTFS-20221001.tar.xz -o void-x86_64-musl-ROOTFS-20221001.tar.xz

Then, we can import the rootfs as a WSL distro and run it¹. Note that you will need to decide on a location for custom imported distros to go. I usually just create a folder named WSL-Custom under my user. You can select any name for the distro, here I picked “Void”.

$ wsl --import Void <custom-folder-for-your-distros>.\Downloads\void-x86_64-musl-ROOTFS-20221001.tar.xz 
$ wsl -d Void

This will get you into a root shell. Let’s add a user with sudo privileges and set it as default in WSL:

# useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/bash $USERNAME
# passwd $USERNAME
# echo -e "[user]\ndefault=$USERNAME" > /etc/wsl.conf
# sed -i 's/# %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL/%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL/' /etc/sudoers

Now we can restart WSL by exiting the distro and running wsl --shutdown. Once you run the distro again, you should get a shell as your new user.

Post-installation

There are a few things that I do after the initial installation:

1. Update xbps and installed packages

$ sudo xbps-install -u xbps
$ sudo xbps-install -Su

2. Copy my ssh private key from Windows so that I don’t have to add a new key per distro onto github/gitlab:

$ mkdir .ssh
$ cp /mnt/c/Users/nadim/.ssh/id_ed25519 .ssh
$ chmod 0600 .ssh/id_ed25519

3. Install packages:

$ sudo xbps-install base-devel git neovim ripgrep fd

References

• https://gist.github.com/kmatt/aad3970a05f72fbbd5f1b9ef7ee1e330