GWSL, A Graphical Windows Subsystem for Linux

what's up guys well in this video i wanted to talk about a windows utility that i discovered called gwsl now this is basically a fork of the vcx serve windows x server basically an x server for the windows desktop so you could run graphical linux applications from windows subsystem for linux or ssh sessions by exporting the x window display to the address of your display the problem with vcx serve is even though it works it's very complicated to export the display for graphical applications you have to type in a command similar to this one here um and you have to do a lot of technical stuff to get that to work what makes gwsl so good is it just makes everything so so easy you could do all of that stuff with just a single click just reading the developer's description here gwsl is an x server that lets you easily run graphical linux applications on windows 10. it lets you run graphical applications located on remote linux machines on windows 10 as well so that's your remote exporting through ssh uh basically it does a lot of stuff so you don't have to that's pretty much the bottom line there and a lot of people in my discord community and people that i deal with around the internet use windows 10 and they also use windows subsystem for linux for me this has become a must-have utility if you use windows subsystem for linux and i'll demonstrate some of its abilities here in just a moment so first we'll do uh some exporting from ssh that's easy enough just it's just as easy as one click graphical ssh connection we'll click that this is the ip address to the raspberry pi that is on my network if i push connect to the machine we just type in the credentials for our ssh configuration on the pi and we're connected it's as easy as that now that's pretty simple that's basic ssh stuff right but like i said this does remote x forwarding so without any additional configurations without any technical input from me it just automatically forwards the display from the raspberry pi on the network to this session here on this desktop so if i want to run a graphical application like pcman fm the file manager for raspbian os i just type it in here and there it is this is not running on this computer this is running over the network being remote displayed on this machine from the raspberry pi so that's just one thing that this can do like i said this this ability isn't new we've been able to do this with ssh for a good while now but the difference is just how easy this utility makes it like i said in the past you'd have to use a command like this on top of your typical ssh connection commands it's just really complex um so next let's move on to some actual graphical linux applications from windows subsystem for linux i don't currently have any installed yet but i'll install some in just a moment to show you how it works if we go to our linux apps menu here we'll see that no graphical apps found now i have ubuntu installed on windows subsystem for linux i'll open up our windows terminal here and then i'll jump over to ubuntu session and another tab and i'm just going to install the entire xfce suite for ubuntu because i do want to show you how to run the full desktop session using this utility so i'm going to go ahead and do a sudo apt install xfce4 and sudo apt install xfce4 session and why not sudo apt install xfce for goodies okay so now we're going to go ahead and install that and it's going to install quite a few packages for us almost a gigs worth here so i'm just going to go ahead and let this run for a few moments while we're waiting for that to install i did want to mention one thing we are using wsl version 1 here we're not even using the newer wsl version 2 which officially from microsoft will at some point have graphical application support officially speaking wsl version 1 does not at least officially from microsoft but that doesn't seem to matter here i haven't had any problems running graphical applications even full desktop sessions using this gwsl tool so i don't know what would happen if i converted this to a version 2 install of wsl but here in version 1 it works flawlessly so i just wanted to point that out just in case any of you are wondering if this was version one or version two it is version one all right we have finished installing all of the xfce components from ubuntu it's basically the zabuntu suite of software so we can go ahead and close our windows terminal and now if we go over here to our gwsl and go to linux apps you'll see that it'll populate a list of applications in this menu there we go and it's automatically exporting the x window display to the desktop in multi window mode if we uh come here to the if we right click and look at the settings x server profiles we can see here we have multi window mode single window mode full screen mode multi window mode is the default and that's usually what you would want to use if you're opening individual applications over your windows desktop these other two are if you're trying to run a full desktop sessions which we will do in a minute but we're going to start with the individual applications first so if we go to our little menu here and click on linux apps we can choose from pretty much anything that was installed on our linux um windows subsystem for linux system you can see there's a lot of stuff here we can launch and run these just like we could if we were on linux here's thundar file manager for xfce if we click that it should open right up for us and there it is of course we are using a different uh you know a windows file structure here so the directories are going to be a little bit different for us but you know we're running thrunar right here on a windows desktop but there is one area that this gets a little strange if we wanted to run a full desktop session we can't launch it from the shell because if we launch like start xfce4 from the shell it will not it'll just run it in the shell it won't export the display so if we want to run a full session we have to create a custom shortcut and to do that we just go to the shortcut creator we can name it anything we want i'm just going to call it xfce session the shortcut command start xfce4 i think that's the right command and this is where we need to pay attention so under the more options tab we're gonna go over here to display mode and we're going to select single window mode or full screen mode don't use multi-window mode weird stuff will happen if you do that so single window mode is going to be our choice you can change your scaling if you want if you have a high dpi uh display um shared clipboard we can enable that if we want to sure why not color mode follow the windows color scheme yeah whatever run as root now we don't want to do that we can do the d bus settings experimental flags um yeah that looks good to me so we're going to go ahead and add to start menu now that we've done that we should have a yeah here it is xfce session on ubuntu so if we click this it'll take a moment but it's going to open up a vcxserve session for us and we should be presented with the full xfce desktop and there it is we are running the full desktop suite right here on top of our windows desktop using gwsl and we could pretty much use linux to its fullest uh capacity anything we want it's all right here now to close this um what you would do is you would just log out you can see there's no restart or shutdown option we just log out when we log out it ends the session and then we just manually close this window here it'll warn us that the client is running yes we'll go ahead and exit that'll stop the client but that's pretty much uh all there is to it now uh like i said before none of these things that we're doing is anything new we've been able to do this stuff for a while now with windows subsystem for linux and especially the x window forwarding on an ssh session all of this stuff we've been able to do for a long time what makes gwsl so good is just how easy it makes everything just as you saw with one click we had a full desktop session running with one click we have graphical applications um you know one click we have an ssh session with x window forwarding it's it's all right here we also have distro tools that we can change the default theme of the applications for launching and you know this is highly configurable now a lot of people use windows subsystem for linux on windows 10 and a lot of people like it but to do a lot of these things that i just showed you generally is a little technical you have to put in a lot of technical commands into the bash terminal or in the windows powershell to get this stuff to function but with this utility gwsl it's just one click away it makes everything so easy and i just like this utility so much i just felt like i should share it with you guys so there it is if you use windows subsystem for linux i think the gwsl utility is an absolute must-have consider donating to the developer this is one of those applications that i think deserve at least some support so it is open source i believe so yeah so that is uh pretty much all there is to it gwsl is an absolute uh fantastic utility for uh windows subsystem on linux if this if you use windows subsystem on linux absolutely download this and give it a try i have not tried it on wsl version two so i really can't tell you how well it works on that but here on wsl version one you can see it works flawlessly there's no issues anyways that's all i really have for this video thanks for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Matthew Moore - Tech Café

Views: 4,558

Keywords: Linux, GNU/Linux, GNU, Windows, WSL, Windows Subsystem For Linux, GWSL, WSL2, Desktop, Xsession, Xorg, Ubuntu, Debian, Xubuntu, XFCE, Powershell, Terminal, Hyper-V

Id: wxW3xGwJgQc

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021