Running Und in Windows Subsystem for Linux ( WSL ) is actually straight forward. To start, we need to install WSL. We can do this by opening a terminal and running this command:

wsl --install

You will be prompted for elevated privileges so make sure you have an admin nearby if you aren't one.


Once that is done, we need to select our distro. We can see which distros are available with this command:

wsl --list --online

Here is what I had available at the time of this writing:


Understand, and by extension und, is not supported on all these OS. For system requirements, please check this article.


For this project, I chose Ubuntu 24, but any of Understand's supported distros should be similar. We can install our chosen distro using a command like this:

wsl --install Ubuntu-24.04


Once that has finished downloading, we can jump in using this command:

wsl


If you already have another distro installed, you will need to specify which distro to start by using the '--distribution' argument. That command will look like this:

wsl.exe --distribution Ubuntu-24.04


Now that we're in WSL, we can download a copy of the Understand CLI using 'wget'. That command will look like this:

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/builds.scitools.com/all_builds/b1232/Understand/Understand-CLI-7.1.1232-Linux-64bit.tgz


Then we can extract using this command:

tar -xvzf Understand-7.1.1232-Linux-64bit.tgz


Once extracted, you can find the und executable here:

scitools/bin/linux64/


For me, it worked without needing any additional libraries, but if you see an error when launching und, we can get und to tell us what libraries are missing by running this command:

QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 ./und


And that should be it. Und is now installed and functional in WSL. Licensing will need to be handled using und and we also have a guide for getting started with und. You can even use our new VS Code plugin to access your WSL installation of und!