Building on Windows (Older Versions)

These steps are no longer required on up-to-date versions of Windows thanks to the new WSLg graphics layer for WSL. If your WSL and Windows versions are up-to-date, you may simply follow the README and ignore this.

Older versions of WSL required installation of an X server such as the VcXsrv X server for Windows. After one has you’ve installed VcXsrv, double click the wsl-vcxsrv-config.xlaunch file in the root of the repository.

Then, all commands should be executed from the WSL environment (easily accessed by opening a Command Prompt / PowerShell / Windows Terminal window and typing wsl at the prompt).

Enable Display Output for WSL

# Enable WSL display output to X server.
echo "export DISPLAY=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{print $2; exit;}'):0.0" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Troubleshooting

If, on WSL, QEMU returns “Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused”, hover over the taskbar icon for VcXsrv to get the precise hostname and then change the value of DISPLAY in ~/.bashrc to that. You can run source ~/.bashrc afterwards to apply this change immediately, or just open a new terminal session.