3.4.7. Installing RMG in the Linux Subsystem on Windows 10

3.4.7.1. Requirements

In order to install the Linux Subsystem, you need to be running Windows 10 build 16215 or later. The build can be determined from the “About” tab in the system settings (see the “OS build” line).

3.4.7.2. Installing the Linux Subsystem

1. Follow the instructions provided by Microsoft to install the Linux subsystem, available here. The basic steps include enabling the Windows Linux subsystem from a powershell run as an administrator, and downloading the latest LTS version of Ubuntu from the Windows store. We recommend Ubuntu (for which these instructions were made) over the other Linux distributions.

2. Once the Linux subsystem is installed, open a web browser in Windows and go to the Anaconda Python Platform Downloads Page. Go to the tab for the Linux Installer, and right click on the download icon for Python to copy the link location. Open an Ubuntu terminal (type in Ubuntu into the Windows search bar if you are unsure where to find it) and paste the link into the terminal immediately after typing the wget command, so that your terminal looks like the following:

   wget https://repo.anaconda.com/archive/Anaconda3-2021.05-Linux-x86_64.sh
   

   Your exact link will look similar to the one above, but may be a more recent version of the installer. Execute this command in the terminal to begin downloading the installer.

3. Once the Anaconda installer has downloaded, execute the following commands in the Ubuntu terminal, changing the name of Anaconda3-2021.05-Linux-x86_64.sh to match the name of the script you downloaded.

   bash Anaconda3-2021.05-Linux-x86_64.sh
   

   Install the anaconda3 folder inside your home directory (it should be the default location when it asks for a location to install). When prompted to append Anaconda to your PATH, select or type Yes. When prompted, do NOT install Microsoft VSCode. If you are interested in this lightweight IDE then you will want to install this into Windows 10 instead of inside the linux subsystem.

4. Execute the following commands to make sure that all of the required packages in Ubuntu are also installed:

   sudo apt install gcc g++ make graphviz
   

   Note: installing graphviz as a system package makes sure that rendering libraries that are not included in the WSL version of Ubuntu are installed. Unfortunately, the graphviz conda package does not install these dependencies in the RMG conda environment (later in the installation), instead relying on system libraries even in native Linux installations.

5. Follow the instructions for either the binary (Binary Installation Using Anaconda for Unix-Based Systems: Linux and Mac OSX) or source installation (Installation by Source Using Anaconda Environment for Unix-based Systems: Linux and Mac OSX) for the Linux Operating system. Follow these instructions from the point directly after installing Anaconda.