Windows host system configuration

Installing and configuring Docker to run under the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) must be done manually, rather than through the install.py script as with Linux and macOS.

1. Make sure your Windows 10 or Windows 11 system is up-to-date with the current Windows cumulative update.
2. Open PowerShell or Windows Command Prompt in administrator mode by right-clicking the icon in the Start Menu and selecting Run as administrator.
3. Enter the command wsl --install and wait for the installation to finish.
4. Reboot the system.
5. Upon rebooting, the Linux terminal will open automatically with Installing, this may take a few minutes…. Wait for this process to complete.
6. As prompted, create a default UNIX user account by providing a username and password.
7. Install Docker by running curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh followed by sudo sh get-docker.sh.
8. Add the user account you just created to the docker group by running sudo usermod -a -G docker username, replacing username with the username you created before.
9. Verify Docker and Docker Compose are correctly installed by running docker --version and docker compose version.
10. If running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, to ensure container networking works correctly, run sudo update-alternatives --config iptables and select the option for iptables-legacy.
11. Restart WSL by rebooting the system.
12. Upon rebooting, open the Start Menu and select the name of the Linux distribution you installed (Ubuntu is the default).
13. Continue with the Malcolm installation and configuration as described in the Quick start documentation or illustrated with the Installation example using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Once the configuration is complete, Malcolm will be started and stopped from within your WSL distribution’s terminal environment as described in Running Malcolm.

Podman

Malcolm can run on Podman as a rootless alternative to Docker. See the Linux instructions for Installing and configuring Podman for more information.