Hi Aik,
Thank you very much for your reply. To answer your questions, I'm building towards Cyclone V and, yes, it is the SD image that troubles me. Or, rather, the lack on continuity in documentation from project start to end. I did all the initial parts as per the Intel and Windows documentation and build the prerequisites as per the Rocketboards instructions.
Install/enable WSL1 with Ubuntu 18.04 (every document I found from Intel specifically mentions this, as the debug is allegedly not compatible with WSL2). That includes the apt installs you mention. That works just fine, and I tested that I could generate the compile files just fine, even the .sof though I prefer to do that directly from Quartus. Thus far all is good, albeit cumbersome.
Then comes the conundrum, the generation of the SD image. That apparently requires WSL2, in particular the bitbake (Yocto), which obviously contradicts the Intel requirement of using WSL1. So then what? I have also tried these instructions from Intel on creating the SD image:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/programmable/683435/17-1/creating-an-sd-flash-card-image.html
And then we get back to WSL1 versus WSL2. Since WSL1 is not true virtualization, the instructions fail, or at least they did for me.
So, I guess my true complaint is the lack of a thorough, continuous and complete guide line from Intel from beginning to end with all the instructions and requirements listed so even a process engineer could sit down and do this if given all the FPGA files. Instead, a search on various, disparate boards is required to fix all the problems/missing installs etc. that crops up along the way and that are simply not documented in any way, shape or form. I could understand the lack of documentation should I be trying something the FPGA/SoC was not intended for, but this is the main purpose of this part that I am trying to implement and the lack of coherent documentation on this from Intel's side is honestly outright baffling to me.
I don't mind learning, but continuously wasting my time on something that should have been properly documented and apparently, over the years, consistently was not is something I truly hate.