Create WSL2 with distro fedora

Reference: https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/install-fedora-on-windows

Enable wsl2 on windows

Search Turn Windows Features on or off and turn on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Then, use command wsl --set-default-version 2 to set WSL version to 2

Download fedora tarball and get rootfs

You can find different kind of tarball here: https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/Fedora-Container-Base

Download the right tar file and extract it. Then you can find a file layer.tar. This is the rootfs file we need.

Then, rename the file to something like fedora-39-rootfs.tar

Install Fedora

1. Create a directory to store this distro: Execute command mkdir $HOME\wsl\fedora
2. Execute command wsl --import fedora $HOME\wsl\fedora path\to\fedora-39-rootfs.tar to install Fedora

You can use wsl -l -v to see all of the distros.

Some configuration

1. Upgrade all of the packages: sudo dnf update
2. Fedora is automatically logged in as fedora, we need to create a user

# Download necessary packages
$ sudo dnf install -y util-linux passwd cracklib-dicts

# add user
useradd -G wheel <username>

# config password
passwd <username>

Now you can use wsl -d fedora -u <username> to login as user. To log in automatically, you can execute this in the wsl printf "\n[user]\ndefault = <username>\n" | sudo tee -a /etc/wsl.conf

Download man page

This distro doesn't have man command and we need to config it.

Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64205680/cant-find-any-man-pages-in-fedora-docker-image

1. Check the last line of file etc/dnf/dnf.conf
2. If it's tsflags=nodocs, we can use dnf install -y man-pages --setopt='tsflags=' to download man-pages.