Maven: cannot launch bash because the lx subsystem has an install….

In a bit of a “what the…” moment, I received this message in my terminal under Visual Studio Code “cannot launch bash because the lx subsystem has an install…”. At first I wasn’t sure what it is cause I’m pretty sure that my bash terminal was working as I was using gitbash.

The message is very vague as well as this was a task run using maven, which means that it wasn’t setup to be interactive. This is when I remembered that I have toggled on the Windows Subsystem for Linux within the Windows feature. I thought it actually installed the bash terminal automatically and separately. I was wrong of course.

The way to remedy this is to actually open PowerShell, then type bash. The program will then ask you if you’d like to install Ubuntu on Windows, simply enter Y and the installer will do the rest.

After that, I was able to use bash as normal under Windows again.

Categorised in: Coding