I first pulled the latest release from the Microsoft container repository and then had Podman run it as a named container, listing the file system contents to check that it was running correctly. I was then able to export the container contents from the image using the Podman export command, which creates a tarball from the target container’s file system.
As Windows 11 provides a direct link to installed WSL file systems from Windows, I navigated to my Ubuntu user directory and copied the Azure Linux tarball to Windows, where it was ready to import into WSL. Microsoft does provide instructions to build configuration scripts for full-scale WSL installs, but if you just want to look at a distribution and don’t mind running as root, you can simply create a target directory for your Linux file systems and use the WSL import command to create a new instance in that folder with a specific name from your tarball.
If you want to build a standard WSL image that can be installed across a team, it’s a good idea to create a package configuration using Microsoft’s recommended scripts. This will set up groups, force the creation of a local user, and add the user to them, for example, ensuring access to sudo. You can improve integration between the Azure Linux install and Windows Terminal by creating a terminal profile with the official blue penguin logo; otherwise, all you get is the default name and icon as launch options.
