The new Windows 10 bash shell is not very impressive once you get it installed. I have tried it and I could not ping websites even though Microsoft Edge could access the Internet. It is possible to install packages if these lines are added to the /etc/hosts file.
91.189.91.14 archive.ubuntu.com 91.189.92.201 security.ubuntu.com |
But using ping does not work. I cannot even add a static route with the ip route add command. Microsoft really need to fix this. I would use this if I could use links or lynx to browse Slashdot in a CMD window on a Windows 10 desktop. But since I have Debian Jessie installed on my laptop with the Kali Linux package repositories merged in, it is a little redundant. There is a big fuss about the Windows 10 bash shell, but it needs a lot of work before it is even usable. In a Virtual Machine in VMware running on a computer with 12 Gigabyes of RAM with 4 Gigabytes devoted to the VM, it keeps stopping and I have to press ENTER to keep an operation going like an APT update. I have no idea why this is. Better to run Debian Jessie in a VM and SSH into it and get a bash shell on your desktop that way.
Linux has come a long way since the early days, now I can run a Linux shell on my Android phone that supports apt-get. But the Microsoft alternative is quite underwhelming. A pity, it promised so much but is delivering so little. There are so many reports of Internet connectivity issues: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/5. Why can they not fix this? Offer a generic network driver that is always connected to the host using NAT and allows Internet access? If your machine was behind a proxy, adding proxy information to /etc/apt/apt.conf would be required, but this should work fine. Possibly they need to virtualise a network connection and always allow Internet access. If the CMD and Powershell windows can access the Internet why not the Debian Linux bash shell? Although Microsoft have apparently not yet implemented ICMP sockets. This is why ping does not work.
One person suggested disabling the Windows Firewall completely and this fixed the problems they were having, but this would be a bad thing. Once the problems are sorted out, this might actually be a useful tool, but not yet.