how to install centos on wsl windows 10

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), comes with a handful of linux distributions you can use, but Centos is not one of them. In this video I'll show you how to import Centos as a distro on WSL and make it your default. You don't need to install virtualbox. Docker is used to create and import the container into wsl. You'll have Centos 8 running on wsl in minutes!

UPDATE: If you have WSL2 installed you can't run the docker commands from Powershell. Either run them from command prompt or run them from a linux (Ubuntu), distro within WSL2.

[fanemanelistu]

If you're doing this on the newly released WSL 2 with Docker Desktop, make sure to run the commands specified in the video inside a simple "Command Prompt" app (which uses cmd.exe), NOT in a "Windows PowerShell" app (which use powershell.exe), or else when you get to the last step that imports the tar as a WSL distribution you will get an error like this:
> wsl --import Centos8 .\CentOSImage .\centos.tar
Unspecified error
BTW, the commands from the video are:
docker pull centos:latest
docker create -i centos bash
docker export [container_id] > centos.tar
wsl --import Centos8 .\CentOSImage\ centos.tar
wsl -d Centos8

[leosahayarajan]

Worked in WSL2... Thank you so much!!!

[kerbization]

How can you launch it from the windows key menu? If you have multiple distributions installed under wsl.

[vinaybhaskarchandratre]

Can you tell about X11 and graphics support ?

[dataupdater]

This is not working on new publicly released WSL2 with Docker Desktop Stable 2.3.0.2.
wsl --import Centos8 .\CentosImage\ centos.tar
quits with the following : Unspecified error

[salemzridette]

Thank you. Do these steps work for redhat?

[SaraswotiKhadka]

how to switch if you dont want to make it default