Martin Maugeais | Blog

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2024-10-31 22:30:04

One of my clients requires that I use a virtual machine to access the company network. I do all my dev work in UNIX environments, but I need a Windows machine sometimes, to test their products. I was informed that two virtual machines was an unreasonable expense, so I opted for a Windows machine, my plan being to use Ubuntu within it, thanks to WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Sadly there seemed to be something wrong with the install, because WSL kept closing as soon as I opened it. Well, not quite. A quick search revealed that this was fine, normal, totally expected behavior: I hadn't installed any distro! What did I expect, a nice info message??

Alrighty, I thought, easy enough. I just have to wsl --install, which I did in a flash, my fingers gently brushing the keyboard. I'm almost done with this install, I told myself. You won't believe what happened next.

Which feature was, apparently, too much to ask. At least I had an error code to search in Ecosia (What? You don't like trees?). Microsoft's learning pages informed me with a characteristic corporate deadpan tone that I needed to check the Hyper-V system requirements, manuallye nable nested virtualization, fix the whatchamacallit on the hootenanny valve and get a PhD in non-euclidian geometries. Regrettably I had no time to do any of this before my lunch break.