SSH X Forwarding with WSL2

I had Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, so before anything I started by upgrading to 22.04 LTS (btw, sudo apt remove --purge snapd is useful in this scenario). Not without first facing an issue with not having connection with the Internet. Recently changed my desktop’s motherboard, and this one has a built-in WiFi adapter, maybe it’s related.

Based on this superuser question I only executed a few commands to fix this malformed /etc/resolv.conf.

1sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf
2sudo bash -c 'echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf'
3sudo bash -c 'echo "[network]" > /etc/wsl.conf'
4sudo bash -c 'echo "generateResolvConf = false" >> /etc/wsl.conf'

And finally from PWSH “rebooting” the OS with wsl --shutdown.

Found some mentions of Xming and VcXsrv while reading about GUI applications with WSL, until I wondered why it wasn’t diretly available in WSL since I’ve noticed many people doing this to replace some of the need for Linux environment. Given this assumption, I went ahead and read about the WSL1 vs WSL2 comparison. Apparently I had to update my old Ubuntu subsystem to use WSL2 (which enables WSLg).

This was easy to do, just following the instructions in the WSLg readme.

1wsl --list -v
2wsl --set-version Ubuntu 2
3wsl --shutdown

After doing this I was able to launch GUI applications from my Ubuntu subsystem; now to X forwarding.

All I had to do here was install xauth and make sure the DISPLAY environment variable was set correctly.

1# both are set automatically in my case
2export DISPLAY=:0 # locally
3export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0 # remote

As for my .ssh/config, it ended up simply being as follows:

1Host hostname
2        HostName IP
3        User USER
4        Port PORT
5        ForwardX11 Yes
6        ForwardX11Trusted Yes