Setting Up a Programming Environment via Windows 10 Bash

Steven J. Zeil

Last modified: Aug 1, 2019
Contents:
1 Get Linux for Windows 10
1.1 sudo apt-get
2 X
3 Installing the Compilers
4 Installing Eclipse
5 Optional packages

In 2016, Microsoft added to Windows 10 (64 bit) the ability to run Ubuntu Linux in parallel with Windows. Variously referred to as “Bash on Windows”, or “Ubuntu on Windows”, and more officially as the “Windows Subsystem for Linux”, this seems to be a very useful way to work with Linux-based software development tools from a Windows 10 machine. Microsoft has announced plans to support other Linux distributions as well.

What it is
This provides a Linux OS running alongside Windows. Both share the same hard drive (and can access each other’s files), and the clipboard supports copy-and-paste between the two quite naturally. (A small thing, perhaps, but one that I find quite
What it is not
This provides a “server”-style installation of Linux. There is no full Linux desktop. The main entry point to Linux is a text-only bash shell for entering Linux commands. The ability to inter-script (i.e., to launch Windows programs from Linux or vice versa) seems quite limited.
What it could be
Combined with an X server running under Windows, you can launch and run GUI programs from Linux.

In this document, I’ll walk you through the process of setting up a programming environment consisting of:

Now, yes, you can install those compilers and that IDE directly in Windows, but some things just seem to me to run more “smoothly” in Linux. And if your PC is a different version of Windows (or not Windows at all), those other guides are where you should go.

And there’s nothing wrong with trying out both approaches.

1 Get Linux for Windows 10

You’ll find the instructions here, but in case that page moves or disappears, the summary is:

  1. Make sure you have Windows 10, 64-bit, and that you have been keeping it updated. (As of 6/1/2017, Microsoft says that you should have update 14393.0 or later).

  2. Turn on Developer Mode: Open Settings -> Update and Security -> For Developers and select the “Developer mode”. Close the Settings window.

  3. Enable Linux for Windows: From the taskbar, search for “Turn Windows features on or off”. Select “Windows Powershell 2.0” (if not already selected) and select “Windows Subsystem for Linux (beta)”. Click OK.

  4. Back at the taskbar, search for “bash”. You should see it as “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows” Select it to run bash.

    Try some simple Linux commands such as ls, cd, and pwd. You’ll find that your Windows lettered disc drives are available under ‘/mnt’. For example, your C: drive is /mnt/c.

1.1 sudo apt-get

Before we continue on, let’s introduce a couple of the programs that you will be using through the rest of this process.

For example, the following sequence is how you update your Linux software:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The first command actually fetches the latest information about what updates are available. The second installs the updates. The “sudo” in front causes them to be run as the administrator. When you give the first “sudo” command, you will be prompted for your password to prove that you really are the account owner. After that, sudo remembers your identity for a short period of time, so you can give multiple sudo commands in a row, only asked for your password once, as long as you don’t take too much time in between.

Go ahead and give those two commands now.

Try to give those two commands on a fairly regular basis so your Linux OS stays up to date. You’ll actually be notified when you start a new bash session if there are updates awaiting.

Close your bash session for now by giving the command

exit

2 X

Now let’s work on displaying graphics form your Linux programs.

The first step is to get an X server package. Most X server packages put a heavy emphasis on connecting to remote machines, but we are going to use this one to serve programs running on the same local machine.

  1. So, go to VcXsrv or XMing, download the installer, and run it to install an X server.

    Then run the X Server.

    Get in the habit of running this X server just before you open a Windows bash session. It won’t do much of anything when you run it, other than add a new icon in the task bar tray. It is a server, a program that sits quietly and waits until some other client program calls upon it.

  2. Run Windows bash.

  3. We’re going to test your ability to run X GUI applications from within Linux and to see the results in Windows. So first we need to install an X application. In bash, give the command

    sudo apt-get install xterm

    When the installation is complete, test it by giving the command

    DISPLAY=:0 xterm &

    You should see a new window open up. This is another window in which you can issue Linux commands. It is, however, a Linux/X application, using X to render its general appearance, menus, etc.

  4. The DISPLAY= part of the earlier command is the way that we tell an X _client" program (in that case, xterm) where to find an X server to handle drawing things and on which of many possible screens we want to draw (from among many that server might be managing). In this case, the DISPLAY value is pretty simple, because we are not connecting to a remote machine and we’re using using the default screen.

    Still, we don’t want to have to add that to every command. So let’s set that as the default for our Linux applications.

    Do 

    nano ~/.bashrc

    Add the following line to the end:

    export DISPLAY=:0

    Save that and exit from nano.

    Exit from bash. And then restart it. Now

    xterm &

    should open an xterm window without your needing to supply the DISPLAY preamble.

3 Installing the Compilers

Now we’re ready to start installing some real software. You will need

We’ll install all of these with the following apt-get commands:

sudo apt-get install default-jdk
sudo apt-get install g++
sudo apt-get install gdb
sudo apt-get install make

Once those are done, verify your installation by typing the following in bash:

java -version
g++ --version
gdb --version
make --version

Each should respond with an identifying message making clear that the software is installed and running.

4 Installing Eclipse

Next up is the Eclipse IDE. We could install this with an apt-get command also, but the version in the Ubuntu respository seems to lag far behind the Eclipse project releases. As of this writing, you want “Eclipse Neon”.

  1. Get Eclipse for your platform from the Eclipse Foundation. Because you are browsing from Windows, it will try to push the Windows version of Eclipse at you by default. Use the “Download Packages” link (beneath the large “Download 64 bit” button). From there you can select the Linux 64 bit installer instead of the Windows installer.

    You’ll also have a choice of various pre-packaged forms of Eclipse.

    1. If all that you are interested in is C++, scroll down to the “Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers” and download the installer for 64-bit Linux.

    2. If you want to reserve the possibility of doing Java programming in the future, scroll down to the “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers” and download the installer for 64-bit Linux.

  2. What you will receive from this download is a tar.gzpackage. This is a compressed archive (similar to a .zip file).

    I will assume that you downloaded this into your Windows Downloads directory. In bash, copy this into your Linux home directory: 

    cd ~
cp /mnt/c/Users/your-Windows-login-name/Downloads/eclipse-java-*.tar.gz .
tar xvzf  eclipse-java-*.tar.gz
ls

    You should see a new ~/eclipse/ directory. Your Eclipse installation is in there.

  3. Type

    ~/eclipse/eclipse &

    to launch Eclipse.

  4. If You Installed the Eclipse for Java Developers

    If you installed the Java Eclipse rather than the C/C++ Developer’s version, we need to add the C++ support.

    From the Eclipse Help menu, select Install new software....

    Search “All Available Sites” for “C++” (Note, the search is really slow. Be patient.) or scroll down to “Programming Languages”.

    Select:

    • “C/C++ Development Tools”
    • “C/C++ Library API Documentation…”.

    and follow the on-screen instructions to install those.

You should now be able to create C++ projects in Eclipse.

If you need some help, revisit the Eclipse sections of IDEs for Compiling under X and Debugging under X from CS252.

5 Optional packages

The main purpose of this document was to set up your programming environment. But since you now have a working Linux installation running under Windows 10, here’s a few optional packages you might want to consider installing.

Each of the packages named here can be installed via the apt-get command

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