A quick reminder that this feature is only available on Windows 10 (with the latest update). It’s still a beta feature but the developers have fixed many of the bugs and it’s pretty stable. Hopefully more features will show up in the future to allow us to run more functions closer to the real Ubuntu.
Click the Start button and type in the search “For Developer Settings”.
Choose “Developer mode”. Windows might prompt for a permission. Allow it to proceed.
Again, click on the Start Button, type into the search “Turn windows features on or off”
Windows Features screen will show up. Scroll down to find “Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta)” option and check it.
Click OK. Windows will ask to re-boot. Go ahead and reboot your system.
After computer restarted, click on the Start button and type in search “bash”. Select bash.exe from the search result and run it.
A command prompt like window will appear. It’ll ask you to type “y” to proceed. Type in “y” and wait for the download of the Ubuntu to proceed.
Once the install is done, go back to the Start button and type in search “Bash on Ubuntu”. You can pin the program to the task bar or start menu for a later easy access.
My start Menu looks different from the standard Windows 10 start menu because I prefer Windows 7 style menu. I highly recommend Start10. It’s a paid app for $4.99 but I think it’s worth it. https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/
There are other ways to customize the start menu bar using free software but it’s a topic for a different blog post.
Now that you have Ubuntu Bash install, you can use it just like a normal Ubuntu terminal. Most of the commands work as long as it’s not server or graphical related functions. The best thing I found is the use of grep which Windows needed badly and now we have it!
Another awesome use is installing Go on here. You could do Go on Windows already, but this moves it closer to the Go programming as it was intended.
A good thing to do is to run the update so that this is up-to-date. Use -y so that it says yes to everything or you can leave it out and individually confirm each download:
sudo apt-get update -y