Amazing that you asked this! I was attempting to do the exact same thing at (it seems) the exact same time. Here's my process.
- Install XMing
- Install the xfree apps
- Set DISPLAY=:0
- Run
xeyes==> Awesome googly eyes! - Attempt to build vscode from source. The build docs seem to be incomplete b/c I had to install a ton of libraries beyond those listed e.g.
yarn gulp gulp-cli pkg-config libx11-dev libxkbfile-dev libsecret-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libxss-dev gnome-dev libgconf2-dev libnss3-dev libasound2-dev
Eventually get the yarn tasks to finish such that I could run code.sh
./scripts/code.sh[20474:1128/153959.035267:ERROR:bus.cc(427)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file ordirectory[20474:1128/153959.081986:WARNING:audio_manager.cc(295)] Multiple instancesof AudioManager detected[20474:1128/153959.082101:WARNING:audio_manager.cc(254)] Multiple instancesof AudioManager detected
Looking at ps I see that the process was running.
Conjectures
It seems that building from source from WSL is not yet supported. Or maybe you can build the artifact, but you can't connect to the Windows display to show it. Based on the quality of the xeyes session, it looks like a very, very, very primitive experience e.g. still using WinXP-style minimize / maximize / close icons.
I was literally writing an Issue on their github page when I thought I'd do one last search and found this post. Much of vscode treats WSL as a second-class environment on Windows. Recent work seems to suggest that things are going to get better as driving to integration between Windows' two internal environments continues to improve (e.g. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/39144)
Update 2017-11-30
Based on some pursuit via Github, it seems that this issue has been reported to the WSL team: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/2293. It appears to be under active consideration by the WSL team. I've added some commentary about my use case there.
