Fixing first annoyances with Bash on Windows

When you enable the Linux Subsystem on Windows in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update so you can use Bash and all the GNU utilities, you may encounter a few annoyances like strange error messages, wrong language settings, etc. Here is how to fix the ones I encountered.

Adding Bash to cmder

If you use cmder, you can add a new Bash task like this.

If you do not use cmder, you should. It is a nice terminal app, enables copy and paste and editors like vim and nano work with it in Bash unlike when using the bash.exe directly.

Changing language to English

When I installed the Linux Subsystem on Windows I was quite surprised that it spoke to me in Slovak. I have my display language set to English in Windows 10, only my locale is Slovak. To fix this and make it talk English to you just run

sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF8

Fixing unable to resolve host MACHINENAME

When you try some command that works with the Internet you may get an unable to resolve host MACHINENAME error message where MACHINENAME is the name of your computer. I do not know why this happens but you can fix it by editing /etc/hosts and adding your MACHINENAME to 127.0.0.1

127.0.0.1        localhost MYMACHINE

Using ping

When you try ping you will get and error message saying ping: icmp open socket: Socket type not supported. The only way can can get ping to work is to run bash.exe as Administrator. This is strange, but seems to be limitation of the Windows TCP/IP stack.

Resetting the Linux Subsystem on Windows

When everything fails, open the command prompt as Administrator and use

lxrun /uninstall /full

to completely uninstall the Linux Subsystem on Windows. Just to be sure, you may also want to remove the %localappdata%\Lxss directory. You can install the Linux Subsystem on Windows back using

lxrun /install