MicrosoftDocs / WSL

Source code behind the Windows Subsystem for Linux documentation.
https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/wsl
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Erroneous (or unclear) instructions for manual WSL install #1987

Open pa-0 opened 4 months ago

pa-0 commented 4 months ago

Documentation Issue

The page in Microsoft Learn titled "Install to Windows Server" appears as follows:

Extract and install a Linux distribution

Now that you've downloaded a Linux distribution, in order to extract its contents and manually install, follow these steps:

  1. Extract the <DistributionName>.appx package's contents, using PowerShell:
Rename-Item .\Ubuntu.appx .\Ubuntu.zip
Expand-Archive .\Ubuntu.zip .\Ubuntu

By this point, a user following along would have downloaded the appx distribution file, renamed it to a zip extension in PowerShell and extracted its contents to a folder of their choice -- no issue there; however, step two goes on to instruct:

  1. Once the distribution has been downloaded, navigate to the folder containing the download and run the following command in that directory, where app-name is the name of the Linux distribution .appx file.
Add-AppxPackage .\app_name.appx

Why would the user navigate to the folder containing the "downloaded .appx distribution" that they just renamed to ".zip" and extracted its contents to different folder in the previous step (1)?

Moreover, navigating to the folder holding the recently extracted contents of the appx-renamed-zip file, the user would see the following list of files:

image

Now, I may have missed something, but it seems to me that if this is supposed to be guidance on a manual install. Once the Expand-Archive command has run, the next step would be running .\ubuntu.exe...

I was going to create a PR to correct this myself, but I just wanted to be sure that I'm actually looking at an error here or if this is a personal airhead moment on my part.

Link to documentation page

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-on-server#extract-and-install-a-linux-distribution

Suggested Improvements

Rewrite.