After seeing the successful acceptance of Win-KeX‘s first version, the Kali Linux team has now come up with the second version of Win-KeX for Windows Subsystem for Linux. The new update has support to multi-sessions, sound and clipboard content-copying across apps. Users interested in trying this out should be running on Windows 10 1903 at least.
Win-KeX 2.0 Launched for Windows 10
While we’ve seen Windows 10 September update is crashing the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, earlier updates like the Kali Linux v2020.3 launched last month has a new feature given by Microsoft. This is called the Windows systems running on Linux (Win-KeX), a graphical desktop environment for running Kali Linux on Windows systems.
This, along with the other notable improvements as NetHunter package for more Nokia phones, updates to ARM devices and automatic HiDPI support was released in Kali Linux v2020.3 by Offensive Security team. Now, the team has released the next version of Win-KeX to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, that has the filling features.
Starting with the multi-sessions, the new version has support to run multiple Win-KeX GUI sessions as a root user and an unprivileged user in Seamless Session mode. Running in Seamless Mode is more interesting, as the previous Windows mode runs the Kali Linux desktop session in a separate window. This lets the apps running on Windows and Linux concurrently.
Also, there’s the support for sound introduced that can be activated using the “–sound” or “-s” command-line parameter while starting Win-KeX. Make sure you allow the Windows Defender Firewall access to Public Networks when asked since it will be prompted when running Win-KeX in Seamless Session and with sound.
Lastly, the clipboard sharing feature is a great addition since it now allows users to share the copied/cut content from Kali Linux in WSL 2 to Windows apps! While experiencing these requires you to run on Windows 10 version 2004 or later, Microsoft has recently backported to support the older versions like 1903 and 1909, thus good if you have enabled the WSL feature.
