Description

Currently, when using SolusWSL you will have many errors logged to the screen while installing packages.

Reason: link

The components that output the errors have no use in WSL environment afaik, so we can ignore those errors.

But for me, it is annoying to see red texts on the screen every day, so I tried and found a workaround.

To fix this, we need:

1. Enable systemd
2. Patch clr-boot-manager
3. Use a kernel with apparmor enabled and enable apparmor

Step 1 and 2 are not needed if using the latest version of SolusWSL

Enable systemd

This is the major blocking point preventing me from finding a solution for this issue.

You may try to use genie to enable systemd.

But I never got it running successfully on distro other than Debian. So I have stopped working on the fix for a long time.

Recently, I discovered this script which works well on Solus.

If genie doesn't work for you, give the script above a try. However, it uses [boot] section in wsl.conf so you need to use Windows 11.

I use the minimal setup. since I have no other use for systemd.

Update 25.10.2022

WSL version 0.67.6 and above officially supprts systemd, to enable, follow this link

Patch clr-boot-manager

Information: link

The repo above contain a pre-built binary for using in Solus.

You may need to install efivar to use the patched version

If you want to compile yourself, install these packages:

sudo eopkg it meson check-devel efivar-devel gnu-efi-devel

Build commands:

meson setup build
cd ./build
meson compile

The compiled binary is in ./build/src

Compile WSL2 kernel with apparmor enable

Grab the kernel source from microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

Then update this file with

CONFIG_SECURITY_APPARMOR=y
CONFIG_AUDIT=y

You may also need to comment the line CONFIG_DEFAULT_SECURITY_DAC=y

You may want to put an empty .scmversion file in the root directory to prevent the plus (+) sign to be added to the kernel name.

Reference: link

Then follow the instructions to build the kernel. After compiling successfully, copy the vmlinux file to Windows' drive

I also made a pre-built kernel here

The repository above contains necessary flags in .config file. So you can use it to compile any WSL kernel version you want with

make olddefconfig
make

Reference: link

Install apparmor

sudo eopkg it apparmor

Shutdown all WSL instances to run the new kernel

wsl --shutdown

Update .wslconfig with this:

[wsl2]
kernel=path to the vmlinux
kernelCommandLine=apparmor=1 security=apparmor

Finally, open SolusWSL and verify the fix works:

WSLg

While using the minimal systemd setup with WSLg, I noticed that after systemd started, the symlink /tmp/.X11-unix -> /mnt/wslg/.X11-unix which required for WSLg to work was removed and an actual /tmp/.X11-unix folder was created.

To fix this, we need to follow this link

But we need to do this again everytime WSL shutdowns and restarts. To avaoid this we can create a service

The symlink existed by default if you enable WSLg, but was removed after we start systemd, so we need to wait until it was removed and recreat it

/usr/bin/wslg-init.sh

#!/bin/bash
timeout 10 bash <<"EOF"
while [[ -L /tmp/.X11-unix ]]
do
    sleep 1
done
EOF

if [[ -d /tmp/.X11-unix ]]  && [[ ! -L /tmp/.X11-unix ]]; then
    rm -r /tmp/.X11-unix
    ln -s /mnt/wslg/.X11-unix /tmp/.X11-unix
fi

/usr/lib/systemd/system/wslg-init.service

[Unit]
Description=Check and recreat wslg symlink

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/wslg-init.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable wslg-init.service 

Update 25.10.2022

If you are using WSL version 0.67.6 and above, just use the official systemd support, this should work out of the box and should not cause any conflict with WSLg