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Beginner's Guide
Welcome to Foreign Linux. This guide is for helping new users easily start their journey of Foreign Linux. Foreign Linux is still in early stage. It is intended for use with professionals with moderate Linux knowledge. Users not familiar with a terminal based Linux environment are not encouraged to use it at this point. Before you start please be aware that this is experimental software. Back up your data before you use it.
Foreign Linux should run on any 32-bit or 64-bit Windows editions since Windows 8. Support for Windows 7 or earlier versions is removed in 0.2.
Foreign Linux is a translator for running Linux applications on Windows. But it is not a system or distribution. To make use of it, you have to acquire native Linux software. This initial bootstrapping could be tricky (see here).
To simplify this process, an archive is created and can be acquired here. This archive contains a bootstrapped Arch Linux distribution with the latest Foreign Linux executable so you can use it out of the box.
After extracting the archive, you can simply double click the "run_bash.cmd" batch script to enter the Arch Linux environment. Now you can walk around by invoking your favorite Linux commands. Don't be surprised if something crashes out. You may soon notice the default Arch Linux installation does not contain many useful stuff, we have to use the package manager to install additional software.
For convenience, the mirror for pacman is preconfigured to the default worldwide mirror. You may change this by editing "/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist". You can uncomment an existing server or add a local one.
You can now use pacman to manage packages in the system. Use "pacman -Syu" to synchronize package database. Use "pacman -S " to install a package. For more details about how to use pacman, visit its official wiki page.
To run X applications you will need a native X server for Windows. Xming or Vcxsrv is recommended for this purpose.
flinux is configured to automatically set a correct DISPLAY environment variable for local X server connection. You just need to open X server first, then run any X applications from the command line, and it should work.
Before reporting potential bugs, please see Report a bug first.
Alternatively, you could also talk via gitter or #flinux at freenode.