Custom Arch Linux distribution for WSL

This is an automated script to create an Arch Linux WSL modern distribution.

You can download a pre-built version from the releases page. Get the archlinux.wsl.gz file, decompress it, and double-click the archlinux.wsl file to install it.

Requirements

You need WSL release 2.4.4 or higher to use this installation method. To install a pre-release version of WSL, run the following command:

wsl --update --pre-release

To build the distribution, you need the following tools:

• Docker Engine. On Windows, you can build the distribution using WSL with Docker support.
• Docker Buildx
• Docker personal access token
• curl
• Node.js
• jq
• grep

Build

Before building, create a .env file with your Docker credentials:

DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME=<your docker user name>
DOCKER_HUB_PAT=<your docker account personal access token>

Then run the build script to create the archlinux.wsl file.

Windows Terminal profile

The build process creates a custom profile for the Windows Terminal. The color scheme is a Material Design dynamically generated color scheme based on the Arch Linux logo blue color. The script to generate the profile is available in the terminal-profile directory.

Known issues

systemd services won't start

If you get the following error when running the systemctl command, try to install another WSL distribution with systemd support and check if it works. In my case, systemd started working on Arch Linux after that, and kept working even after uninstalling the other distro.

$ systemctl
Failed to connect to system scope bus via local transport: No such file or directory

Arch Linux trademark

The logo used in this distribution was taken from the Arch Linux logos and artwork page, and I believe its usage in this project fits the permitted use condition from their trademark policy.