As you probably know, there is annual convention called Flock. This year’s is happening in Cape Cod, Hyannis, MA and will begin the morning of Tuesday, August 29. Sessions will continue each day until midday on Friday, September 1.

I have asked all of the session leaders from Flock some questions.

And now you are about to read one of the responses.

Fedora on Windows Subsystem for Linux by Seth Jennings

What is the goal of your session at Flock?

Let users know the technical details of the Windows Subsystem for Linux and about the effort to package a Fedora userspace for use in that environment.

What does it affect in the project?

Platform availability. It can drastically lower the barrier to entry for using Fedora on machines that must have Windows installed.

What does your talk focus on?

The talk focuses on the technical detail of the WSL including the syscall translation layer, init loader, and POSIX filesystem overlay for NTFS. It will also discuss the distribution appx package template that Microsoft provides so that distributions can easily build the distro appx package for the Windows Store.

Without giving too much away, what can attendees expect to learn or
do in your session?

Learn about WSL and the effort to make a Fedora environment available on the platform

Who should attend?

People interested in using Linux native utilities like ssh, scp, git, and more from inside Windows without VMs, dual-booting, or Cygwin.

What do you do in Fedora/how long have you been involved in the project?

I have been running Fedora for 5 years now. I package a handful of Yubikey related software. I am also somewhat involved in efforts to package Kubernetes and OpenShift for Fedora Atomic. I work on upstream Kubernetes and OpenShift as my day job.

What attracts you to this type of work or part of the project?

With the Windows subsystem for Linux, it just really annoyed me that Ubuntu was initially the only distro one could use with WSL, even though it was obvious that the underlying technology was distro agnostic. Challenge accepted!