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Running Silica on Windows Subsystem for Linux.
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silica-wsl.md

Silica for Windows Subsystem for Linix (WSL)

Due to Silica requiring dpkg-deb to properly work, you cannot run Silica in native Windows. As a result, you need to set your machine up WSL and Ubuntu for Windows, which will allow for Linux programs to run in Windows via a terminal.

1. Set up WSL

Please follow this official tutorial. Please use Ubuntu for ideal results.

2. Setting up WSL for dpkg-deb

Due to how dpkg-deb handles permissions, we need to change some settings to make things work.

  1. Run sudo nano /etc/wsl.conf to edit the WSL config.
  2. Copy and paste the following text into the file.
[automount]
enabled = true
root = /mnt/
options = "umask=22,fmask=11"
  1. Run the following command to update your umask to 0022.
echo "\numask 0022" >> ~/.bashrc

  1. Open up Windows PowerShell as an administrator by right-clicking on the Windows button.

  2. Run this command to restart WSL:

Get-Service LxssManager | Restart-Service

That's it! Windows is now ready for Silica! (Note: Please always run Silica through the Ubuntu program or Windows Terminal.)

(Tip courtesy of /u/zoredache on Reddit.)

3. Install dependencies

Like any Debian-based system (like Ubuntu), we need to install some dependencies before downloading Silica.

apt-get install gnupg
apt-get install git

3. Getting Silica

Now it's time to get Silica! Because of how Windows deals with line breaks, we need to download Silica via Git. If you already downloaded Silica via your web browser, delete it. We'll redownload it in a second.

Once you are in the directory you want to download Silica to, run this command:

git clone https://github.com/Shugabuga/Silica/

This will create a new folder for Silica.

4. Text Editors and line breaks

Due to how Windows deals with line breaks, if you wish to create Silica config files by hand, you need to make sure your text editor uses Unix line breaks. This varies by text editor and IDE, so look for a setting about line breaks or EOL characters and set it to Unix.

From here, you're all set for Windows-specific instructions!

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