Cannot install code-server onto WSL. "System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate."

Question

Because I'm on windows, I'm using Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

I have successfully run the following two lines:

curl -fOL https://github.com/cdr/code-server/releases/download/v3.8.0/code-server_3.8.0_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i code-server_3.8.0_amd64.deb

However, I'm having a problem with the last line:

sudo systemctl enable --now code-server@$USER

I get the following error:

System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.

Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 13 '21 at 00:09

The error message indicates that the .deb is designed to use systemd, which WSL doesn't support (without a lot of extra effort).

However, it appears that code-server supports a "standalone" (non-package) based installation. See this section of the install doc for details.

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