Can't install CentOS 6 about wsl-distribution-switcher HOT 7 CLOSED

This is actually an issue with WSL, since lxrun is the one running the adduser --quiet command.

One possible workaround for this would be to create a hook script which replaces adduser during installation with a wrapper that removes the unsupported --quiet argument. That, or it updates adduser to one which supports it.

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Why not use CentOS 7?

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@thebitstick I'm trying to run some legacy software I use at work. The programs exist in binary form and run on CentOS 6 (well, Scientific Linux 6 which is the same). On every other OS like Centos 7 or Ubuntu, I would have to do a lot of hacks with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and so on. It would be very complicated to compile everything from scratch.

@RoliSoft It's tricky... the hook script only runs after switching to the new OS, which is too late. I can't run bash.exe do do anything with CentOS. I am trying to replace adduser during install.py, but that is quite hard. lxrun doesn't run adduser if it is a script, so I have to compile a binary (on another CentOS 6 system). Also, on CentOS, adduser is a link to useradd, which is a different program on Ubuntu...

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@jdmansour @RoliSoft you could try adding to the install.py something that checks if installing CentOS 6 or other out-of-date distros and change the command from adduser --quiet to to adduser

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The adduser command gets called by lxrun, not directly by the installation script. Anyway, I believe this is not the core problem. I can sidestep this issue by using lxrun /setdefaultuser root before running the install script. In this case there is no error message, but I still can't enter WSL. bash.exe doesn't work, nor does anything like bash.exe ls. Strangely enough, lxrun.exe can successfully start binaries (like adduser, usermod, passwd) in the CentOS image, but bash.exe refuses to do anything, and gives no error message.

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@jdmansour Writing to files outside of WSL is very tricky indeed. One thing I found that mostly works, is to not create/delete the file, but rather append to it.

Truncation works with some applications, but not with others. I haven't been able to consistently and successfully truncate files and replace their content from outside of WSL yet.

That being said, files like /etc/passwd are truncated and overwritten by the installer script, and they seem to work.

It would really save a lot of trouble if Microsoft would release some documentation or expose new APIs to write VoIFs metadata to regular files.

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I'm running into the same problem, for the same reasons (legacy compatibility).
I wounder if this can be bypassed by copying the centos:6.x root under another minimal root and then chroot-ing into the centos:6.x directory?
Yes, this would probably work on 1703/RS2/Creators-Update and forward only.

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