LxRunOffline is a tool for managing WSL distributions.

Can be installed using chocolatey:

choco install lxrunoffline

Installing distros

Detailed information in the github repo wiki. Installation of a distro can be done as follows:

LxRunOffline i -n {custom-distro-name} -d {install-location} -f {name-of-tar-file}

where the tar file has been downloaded from https://lxrunoffline.apphb.com/download/{distro}/{version} for the required distribution or is a previously exported distro (using wsl --export or LxRunOffline itself).

The installed distros can be viewed with LxRunOffline l. For detailed summary of an installed distro:

LxRunOffline sm -n {custom-distro-name}

Unfortunately, LxRunOffline installs distros using WSL1. If one has to upgrade to WSL2, one must run

wsl --set-version {custom-distro-name} 2

This conversion, however, may fail, or take an insanely long time depending on the size of the distro and other undocumented reasons (?) as detailed in github:microsoft/WSL:issue#5344 or github:microsoft/WSL:issue#4626.

For a fresh install this should work. (?) Of course, there is a lot of guessing here as I don’t know the exact reasons. For me, importing an old distribution with wsl failed - and after installing it with LxRunOffline, wsl still failed to convert it to version 2, stating

Conversion in progress, this may take a few minutes.
Importing the distribution failed.

after some time. TO BE INVESTIGATED.

Setting the user

If installed this way, the distro will probably default to the root user. To avoid this, we can create a new user from root. First, we list the available users. This is stored in /etc/passwd:

$ cat /etc/passwd

or to just get the usernames and the user ids:

$ awk -F: '{print $1,$3}' /etc/passwd

where we specify the separator : using -F and print only the first entry $1 (which is the username) from the file. As we can see from the first output, the root user has id 0. The default login user usually has id 1000. There are many users with non-login shells as well, not of interest.

Now to create an user:

$ adduser {user-name}

after which we will be prompted to enter the password and user information. Now we can re-list the users to check the user id (this should be 1000 if there weren’t any users already).

Finally, we shutdown the wsl distro and set the default user1

LxRunOffline su -n {custom-distro-name} -v {user-id}

where su stands for set user. The next time we open the distro, we will login as this user by default.

  1. This is only for imported/custom-installed distros. For a distro installed using the default mode wsl --install this can be done using

    {distro-name} config --default-user {user-name}

    from Powershell/cmd. ↩