Pentesting on Arch linux as WSL

This is the second part of the series Pentesting on windows with WSL. If you haven’t checked the first part of the series here’s the link it’s on Kali Linux WSL2. In this part I’ will help you to setup Arch Linux on WSL2 instance and install our favorite hacking tools with Yay package manager .

Lets get started. Prerequisite for the tutorial:

* WSL2 and Virtual Machine feature enabled (explained in part one).
* Linux kernel package update (link).
* Latest package for Arch wsl from (link).

Procedure:
Unzip arch.zip and install it with arch.exe

Set wsl version for your Arch instance in cmd.

Set up the user and password for the instance.

Update pacman with these.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Before installing any tools, Setup fakeroot (#most imp).

Remove fakeroot from IgnorePkg and install necessary packages like fakeroot, wget, base-devel

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Installing Yay (Yet Another Yogurt) for AUR packages

Download and install yay

Now install your favorite tools with yay like this.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —Comparing with WSL Arch and Virtual Machine (Arch)

PARAMETERS          WSL2         VIRTUAL BOX            VMWARE
BOOT TIME:          4sec         15–20 sec              15-20 sec
SIZE:               3 GB         15 GB                  15 GB
RAM:                .5-1 GB      2 GB                   2 GB
SNAPSHOT:           NO           YES                    YES 
SETUP TIME:         2-5 min      15-20 min              15-18 min
GUI:                NO           YES                    YES

Troubleshooting:

The most important part of the tutorial is to remove fakeroot from pacmac.conf. This is done because WSL2 does not necessarily require fakeroot-tcp.

To be clear my pacman.conf looks like this

If this post was helpful, please click the clap 👏 button below a few times to show your support for the author! ⬇