Wikis and Windows




Have you ever:

  1. Realized you needed a Wiki to be a PDF.
  2. Needed to make it automatic so it can be updated without modifying two documents.
  3. Found that most tools you need are on Linux and you’re just not a linux person (yet?).

Let’s talk about using WSL on Windows to use Linux to run a github project! In this little writeup, I’ll explain how to convert a Github or Gitlab wiki into a PDF using WSL, a github wiki converter, and a couple other things.

This tutorial assumes you have a project on Github or Gitlab, and perhaps documentation on their respective Wiki.

First of all, Let’s install WSL.

Open up Powershell with Admin, and type

wsl --install

You’ll need to quickly restart your computer. You’ll see that “Ubuntu” will be installed as a program: let’s run that.

By default, Windows installs Ubuntu. It’s installed without a GUI, which is fine, because we’re mostly interested in running programs.

Once the ubuntu shell is open, it will prompt you to create a user and set a password.

lsblk

this will show you what disks are mounted. You may see “/mnt/wslg/distro” in one of them. What we want to do is go to where our project repository is.