WSL-Distribution-Switcher: install Kali Linux (any Linux distro) on Windows Subsystem

by do son · Published January 11, 2018 · Updated October 10, 2021

Windows Subsystem for Linux Distribution Switcher

The purpose of this project is to let you easily download and install new Linux distributions under Windows Subsystem for Linux and seamlessly switch between them.

The rootfs archives are currently downloaded from Docker Hub’s official images’ repositories (“source”) or published image layers (“prebuilt”).

If you want to read about some of the challenges I faced while implementing the scripts, you can check out this blog post. This readme only contains usage information and some troubleshooting.

Usage

The scripts provided here are written in Python 3, and they need to be run from Windows, NOT from WSL. You can download a Python 3 installer from their official website, or you can use the one bundled with Cygwin. Since WSL is stored in %LocalAppData% for each user, you don’t need admin rights in order to use any of the scripts.

To begin, clone the repository or download a copy of it.

Obtaining tarballs

get-source.py

This script can download the tarballs for the official images in Docker Hub.

The first argument of the script is the name of the image, optionally followed by a colon and the desired tag: get-source.py image[:tag]. For example, to get the rootfs tarball for Debian Sid, just run get-source.py debian:sid. If you don’t specify a tag, latest will be used, which is generally the stable edition of the distribution.

$ python get-source.py debian:sid

[*] Fetching official-images info for debian:sid...

[*] Fetching Dockerfile from repo tianon/docker-brew-debian/.../sid...

[*] Downloading archive https://raw.githubusercontent.com/.../sid/rootfs.tar.xz...

[*] Rootfs archive for debian:sid saved to rootfs_debian_sid.tar.xz.

For presentation purposes, the following images and tags are available as of August 18th:

debian – 8.5, 8, jessie, latest | jessie-backports | oldstable | oldstable-backports | sid | stable | stable-backports | stretch |testing | unstable | 7.11, 7, wheezy | wheezy-backports | rc-buggy | experimental
ubuntu – 12.04.5, 12.04, precise-20160707, precise | 14.04.5, 14.04, trusty-20160802, trusty | 16.04, xenial-20160809, xenial, latest | 16.10, yakkety-20160806.1, yakkety, devel
fedora – latest, 24 | 23 | 22 | 21 | rawhide | 20, heisenbug
centos – latest, centos7, 7 | centos6, 6 | centos5, 5 | centos7.2.1511, 7.2.1511 | centos7.1.1503, 7.1.1503 | centos7.0.1406, 7.0.1406 | centos6.8, 6.8 | centos6.7, 6.7 | centos6.6, 6.6 | centos5.11, 5.11
opensuse – 42.1, leap, latest | 13.2, harlequin | tumbleweed
mageia – latest, 5
oraclelinux – latest, 7, 7.2 | 7.1 | 7.0 | 6, 6.8 | 6.7 | 6.6 | 5, 5.11
alpine – 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4, latest | edge
crux – latest, 3.1
clearlinux – latest, base

To install Kali Linux, you can do as below

$ python get-prebuilt.py kalilinux/kali-linux-docker

[*] Requesting authorization token...

[*] Fetching manifest info for kalilinux/kali-linux-docker:latest...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:6e61dde25369335dcf17965aa372c086db53c8021e885df0e09f9c4536d3231e...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:45f74187929d366242688b3d32ccb5e86c205214071b99e94c0214e7ff2bc836...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:e5b4b71338633a415ad948734490e368e69605ba508a5fa8ad64775433798fb2...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:3f96326089c0580ebbcbb68d2f49dce1d7b6fe5cd79d211e4c887b0c9cdbeb02...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:d4ecedcfaa73285da5657fd51173fa9955468bf693332c03dce58ded73615c62...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:340395ad18dbbbd79d902342eef997fbd3ecb6679ad5005e5e714e8b0bc11e77...

[*] Downloading layer sha256:b2860afd831e842446489d37f8933c71dbd4f5d5f4b13d35185c4341fcca9a84...

[*] Rootfs archive for kalilinux/kali-linux-docker:latest saved to rootfs_kali....tar.gz.

Demo