Photo by James Bold on Unsplash

Already use WSL with Ubuntu? Want an Upgrade??

This is a guide that will cover upgrading Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) from the current LTS version to the latest 'normal' version 18.10.

I found this post on dev.to this weekend detailing going from version 18.04 to 18.10 on Ubuntu for Windows Subsystem Linux. You will know form earlier posts from me that trying to go the update route on WSL is time consuming and you're basically better off starting again.

I tried it myself and got in a bit of trouble, you can see by checking out the comments on David's post

So from uninstalling my version of Ubuntu I went ahead and tried again, if you have read the comments on David's post you'll see that I came up against an issue with being unable to reach the 'snap store'. I don't know what that is or means but basically it stopped my upgrade and I was left not knowing if I was fully upgraded or not.

Thankfully someone else had come across the same problem and asked on Stack Overflow, basically you need to uninstall Lxd with:

sudo dpkg --force depends -P lxd; sudo dpkg --force depends -P lxd-client

Now we can go about updating Ubuntu with the do-release-upgrade command, if you do that right away you may see something along the lines of:

This is setting the updater to to only check for Long Term Support versions, we're going to change that now by changing the prompt from lts to normal, in bash use:

sudo nano /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

You should see the default release upgrader settings:

You'll need to set it to normal:

Now we can go and do the release upgrade command:

sudo do-release-upgrade

Upgrade time!

Now I was quite surprised that it didn't really take that long at all for the upgrade to complete, you may get asked questions about modified packages and weather you want to accept the maintainers or keep your version, I will always go with the maintainers version of any packages. You can do what you like with yours, I'm not your mum 😜

That's it

You should now have your Ubuntu WSL version at 18.10 👏

If, like me, you uninstalled Ubuntu and tried to reinstall it and are getting errors like this:

Then what worked for me was to restart the LxssManager via a PowerShell console with admin rights.

Get-Service LxssManager | Restart-Service

Wrap up!

We went ahead an upgraded our WSL Ubuntu version from 18.04 to 18.10, we removed Lxd which isn't needed on WSL but is part of the Microsoft Store version 🤷‍♂️

Then we changed the default behaviour of the release upgrader from lts to normal.

Once we have done those two parts we can then go ahead and upgrade Ubuntu with `do-release-upgrade.

Thanks for reading 🙏

Please take a look at my other content if you enjoyed this.

Follow me on Twitter or Ask Me Anything on GitHub.