I came across another question just today where a Systemd script (similar to what I'm about to show you) is creating issues. Systemd drastically alters the behavior of WSL (and even other distributions that you might run under WSL). There are ways to make it work (as I'll demonstrate), but I do not recommend running Systemd on WSL unless you really understand what is going on and/or can troubleshot it. Gnome requires Systemd, and Systemd does not play well with WSL (and WSL does not play well with Systemd).

Launch xfce4 or other desktop in Windows 11 WSLg Ubuntu distro.

This answer builds off several of my previous Ask Ubuntu answers: These can be enabled via the Windows GUI or by running the following commands in an elevated prompt.Well, it's been a while since I worked with Kali or Kex, but I was able to get Gnome hobbling along, at least. The following windows features must be enabled to run WSL 2.0 The examples below are from a system running Windows Insider build 1.1. PrerequisitesĪt the time of writing this blog post you must run Windows 10 build 18917 or higher, which means that you need to be at least on the slow ring of the Windows Insiders builds. Now let me be honest here all the information described below does already exist across various websites and forums, the primary objective of this blog post is to put it all in one place to provide others and myself with all the necessary instructions to get kali linux up and running in WSL 2.0 and use RDP to connect to the kali desktop.

What’s nice about running kali in WSL is that you get easy and quick access to linux tools without having to setup and start a complete virtual machine.īut what if you want to run a tool with a GUI? Well with a few tricks that works as well.

Since Microsoft introduced WSL ( Windows Subsystem for Linux) I’ve been playing with it occasionally, in the beginning however some of the tools I wanted to use like nmap and hping3 would not work due to issues with networking in WSL 1.0, however with WSL 2.0 these issues seem to be resolved so gave it another try earlier this year in June and all worked as expected.

Wsl2 kali