The art of simplicity

At my current employer we are still using a local build server to host our Azure Pipeline agents and run our builds. Having multiple agents running on the same machine works most of the time as most frameworks and libraries we depend on allow multiple side-by-side installations. Unfortunately there is one framework that doesn't like this; node.js. So far, we have worked around this by using NVM(Node Version Manager) to switch between node.js version. Of course this only works as long as no 2 builds are running at the same time that use a different node.js version. We did a previous attempt to fix this problem by running docker on our build server and host separate build agents in a container. But it introduced too much overhead on our build server and we never succeeded in getting it stable. As we had to move our build environment to a new server, we thought it would be a good time to finally fix this problem; this time by running multiple Linux distributions using WSL2 instead...

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets developers run a Linux environment directly on Windows, without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dual-boot setup. It is a very convenient way for developers to access and use a Linux environment. But although it not that difficult to get started , it can still take some time before you really understand how to use it. If you also had some trouble to get started with WSL2, or even never took a look at it before, I have some good news for you. Starting from WSL 2.4.4(Pre-release), you get a ‘Getting Started’ experience. Let me show… Getting Started experience First we need to make sure that we download and install the latest pre-release version. You can find the correct installer here . Download the msi file and run the installer. After the installation has completed, open the freshly installed WSL Settings app:   The WSL settings app gives you easy access to a lot of the options that can be configured w...

T o avoid carrying around multiple laptops for different customers I typically ask if they can provide me a VDI (for example through Azure Virtual Desktop). One of my clients is not on a cloud platform (yet), so the VM they provided me was running on a local(read: in a traditional datacenter) hyper-v cluster. As we were investigating to move to a container based development model, I installed Podman Desktop on the provided machine. Podman Desktop requires a Podman machine to be created to be able to run workloads. However when I tried to create a new machine, it failed with the following error message: Error: the WSL import of guest OS failed: exit status 0xffffffff I did a second attempt through the commandline but this failed as well: podman machine init Extracting compressed file: podman-machine-default-amd64: done Importing operating system into WSL (this may take a few minutes on a new WSL install)... WSL2 is not supported with your current machine configuration. Pl...