Michael Harty

I’m a geologist learning and using data science. Read about my projects and the things I’m learning.

I’ve been using WSL as a dev environment on my laptop for a couple years. This week something updated itself and things stopped working. I had to uninstall everything and re-install it. I thought I’d write down the steps I took to get it working again.

Install WSL

  • Follow these instructions to install WSL

    • In powershell run:

    wsl --install

    This will install and set up WSL. It should also install the default Linux distro (Ubuntu).

    I had some issues where it didn’t actually install any distro. Run wsl -l to see what distros are installed. If all you see is docker-desktop and docker docker-desktop-data then you need to install a distro. Run wsl --list --online to see what distros are available. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Run wsl --install -d Ubuntu-20.04 to install it.

    • It will then prompt you to create a user account.

    • Update and upgrade the packages: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Windows Terminal

  • Install the Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store. The link above has some good steps to customize the terminal.

VS Code

  • Install VS Code

  • Install the Remote - WSL extension. For me, this caused the biggest headache. To get it to work I had to install an old version (v0.66.3). The latest version caused the WSL extension to terminate. It gave a lot of errors related to “could not resolve authority”

  • Set up extensions in vs code

    • Spell Checker
    • GitLens
    • Git Graph
    • Vim
      • change the setting "vim.useCtrlKeys": false to disable the ctrl keybindings. This way you can use ctrl-c to copy and ctrl-v to paste.

Git

  • Configure git identity
    • git config --global user.name "Your Name"
    • git config --global user.email "
  • Create an ssh key for GitHub
    • ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -b 4096
    • Go to the GitHub SSH Settings Page and create a new key. Paste in the contents of the file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Bash setup script

  • Install useful software
    • Miniconda
    • Docker
    • Docker Compose
    • Fish Shell
    • There is a bash script in my dotfiles repo that installs all of this stuff. You can find it here
      • git clone git@github.com:mharty3/dotfiles.git

Oh my fish

  • Set up Fish Shell with Oh My Fish Theme Close and reopen the terminal before and after this step. 
      curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish/master/bin/install | fish
  omf install agnoster
  conda init fish

Install a powerline font

To get the fish terminal to properly display, you’ll need a powerline font (or “Nerd Font”). I installed Cascadia Code PL (ttf variable is recommended): https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/wiki/Installing-Cascadia-Code

Updated: