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Troubleshooting WSL

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Alex Pyrgiotis edited this page Dec 24, 2025 · 4 revisions

On Windows, Dangerzone uses WSLv2 to run its Sandbox.

We do our best to install it transparently, but there are cases where this can fail. This page is meant to be a resource for people stuck with a non-working WSL 2 installation.

If you end up in a similar situation, here is what you can do to unblock you. Items are ordered from the more broad solution to some more specific.

How to check WSL is enabled?

First, check if WSL is enabled in your machine. Run the following in an elevated PowerShell window:

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Check the prerequisites

  • You must be running Windows 10 version 2004 and higher (Build 19041 and higher) or Windows 11.
  • On some computers, you need to enable the hypervisor in your bios

Reboot your computer

Rebooting is the first thing to try. In some specific cases, Windows requires a reboot before WSLv2 being fully functional. After initializing WSLv2 ourselves, we prompt you for a reboot, but it's possible you postponed it, or missed the dialog.

Check that "Hyper-V" and "Virtual Machine Platform" features are enabled

Check if these two features are enabled:

  • Click on Start
  • Search for "Turn Windows features on or off"
  • Ensure "Hyper-V" and "Virtual Machine Platform" are both checked

If they were not previously selected, reboot and try to run Dangerzone again.

Check your BIOS settings

It's possible that your machine doesn't have Hyper-V enabled in the BIOS/UEFI. If that's the case, reboot your machine, enter the Bios/UEFI settings and ensure it's enabled.

Here is how:

From either the Sign on screen or the Start menu, select Power (Power button icon) > hold Shift while selecting Restart. Select Troubleshoot > Advanced options > UEFI Firmware settings.

Inside the settings, make sure virtualization and Hyper-V are set to "enabled".

Install WSL manually

Open PowerShell in administrator mode by right-clicking and selecting "Run as administrator", enter the wsl --install command, then restart your machine.

Remove the previous distribution and retry

List the available WSL distributions:

wsl --list

Remove the ones that start with podman-dz-internal-<version>. For instance, for Dangerzone 0.10.0, run:

wsl --unregister podman-dz-internal-0.10.0

Open Dangerzone and see if it works correctly this time.

Reinstall Hyper-V

In some cases, uninstalling and reinstalling Hyper-V can fix the issue:

Step 1: Uninstall

  1. Click on Start, search for "Turn Windows features on or off" and click on that
  2. Uncheck "Hyper-V" and "Virtual Machine Platform"
  3. Then click on OK to uninstall and reboot your PC

Step 2: Re-install

  1. Click on Start, search for "Turn Windows features on or off" and click on that
  2. Check "Hyper-V" and "Virtual Machine Platform"
  3. Then click on OK to install and reboot your PC

Step 3: Set Hyper-V to start automatically with Windows.

  1. Click on Start, search for Command Prompt
  2. Right-click on that and select "Run as Administrator"
  3. Paste this command and press Enter: 
    bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype Auto
  4. Reboot your PC and try to install Dangerzone again

Nothing works!

If none of the above worked, you probably exhausted all the known solutions to this problem. If that's your case, please open an issue in our bug tracker.

More resources

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

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