Adventures in Tech

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has come a long way—especially under Windows 11 . WSL2 now offers smooth integration for Linux graphical applications, making it feel less like a compatibility layer and more like a native experience. But if you're an Emacs user, you might have noticed something off. Launching Emacs under WSL can feel like stepping into a time machine. Tiny fonts, washed-out visuals, and a UI that evokes the green-and-amber glow of vintage terminals. Functional? Yes. Pleasant? Absolutely not. But here's the good news: it is easy to make Emacs under WSL2 look just as sharp and modern as it does on Mac OSX . The emacs-pgtk build is designed for better graphical integration under WSL. It uses the Pure GTK interface , which plays nicely with WSL’s GUI support. sudo apt install emacs-pgtk To make Emacs look great, we’ll use Windows’ rich font library. First, edit your font configuration: sudo emacs /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and add the Windows Font directory...

I have been using WSL1 for a long time now and have been extremely pleased with it. After setting up Cygwin/X server, I don’t have a need for running Linux in a VM anymore. With the new Windows update, WSL is changing to support GPUs and GUI applications, so I decided to upgrade my install to make use of these improvements once they are shipped.  The upgrade path is easy: you can choose to configure a new WSL2 environment, or you can migrate your existing one. I decided to upgrade my install, since I had a lot of packages installed, and did not want to reinstall and configure them in a new environment again.  First, I started by getting everything I have in my Ubuntu environment up to date:   sudo apt update  sudo apt upgrade  Then in a windows command prompt, I updated my default WSL environment to version 2:   wsl –set-default-version 2  WSL2 requires Virtual machine platform support, and if that is not enabled, you can easily enable it throu...

I have been using the Windows Subsystem for Linux for a long time now and have been pretty pleased with it for text-based applications. When I need to use a graphical application, I fire up Hyper-V with a full Ubuntu install, and mount my local drives to access my directories and files. The heavy-handed solution worked well for a long time now, but over time I found I was installing the same set of programs I used frequently in both places. There must be a better solution. If only I could run graphical applications on WSL. Turns out there is a way.   I searched for a free X11 server that I can install on Windows 10 and found a couple that were highly rated. I also remembered that when I used Cygwin long time ago, it came with its own X-server, and wondered if I can install that separately, since with WSL I did not need Cygwin as a whole. It did, and I installed Cygwin/X server and fonts. After the install, I ran Xlaunch, which ran a configuration wizard to start the X-serv...