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Notes for Windows Users

Free Docker alternative for Windows​

You can use Docker Desktop for Windows together with Windows command line or Windows Linux Subsystem (WSL2) for this tutorial. But note that Docker Desktop for Windows needs a license for commercial use beginning of 2022.

There is a free alternative for Linux or WSL2 called podman from Redhat, which has a compatible command line and also the Dockerfiles are compatible, see podman.io. Further advantages are that podman is more lightweight - it doesn't need a service and root privileges to run containers. Install podman on WSL2 Ubuntu 24.04:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install podman

Using podman build and podman run​

Throughout this tutorial, we use the commands podman build and podman run under the hood, which is fully compatible with docker build/run The podman commands that we provide in our tutorials all assume that they are executed either from a unix environment or from WSL2.

Equivalent of docker-compose​

For Polynote-lab, you need something like docker-compose to easily coordinate multiple containers. Podman-compose exists but is not maintained for the latest podman versions. There are problems regarding networking. Instead, we created run.sh script create the network and startup the containers.

After running ./run.sh you should now be able to open Polynote on port localhost:8192, as WSL2 automatically publishes all ports on Windows. If the port is not accessible, you can use wsl hostname -I on Windows command line to get the IP address of WSL, and then access Polynote over {ip-address}:8192.

Known Issue with podman on WSL2 on Windows​

If you suddenly cannot execute any podman commands anymore and get an error like this:

    ERRO[0000] error joining network namespace for container 88a8d5c7115598aeaa31fcd1cee8c084fee3ab2577b4f61dc317053d7da032f9: error retrieving network namespace at /tmp/podman-run-1000/netns/cni-f73b0b0b-155d-3c43-30b2-278280c003f1: unknown FS magic on "/tmp/podman-run-1000/netns/cni-f73b0b0b-155d-3c43-30b2-278280c003f1": ef53
    Error: error joining network namespace of container 88a8d5c7115598aeaa31fcd1cee8c084fee3ab2577b4f61dc317053d7da032f9: error retrieving network namespace at /tmp/podman-run-1000/netns/cni-f73b0b0b-155d-3c43-30b2-278280c003f1: unknown FS magic on "/tmp/podman-run-1000/netns/cni-f73b0b0b-155d-3c43-30b2-278280c003f1": ef53

Then you may be experiencing a known problem with podman on WSL2 on windows after a system restart related to the /tmp directory.

If you encounter this error, there are two quick workarounds:

  1. Delete the tmp dir of your WSL2 installation and restart WSL2
  2. The podman commands with sudo may still work, e.g. sudo podman ps will work even if podman ps wont

See https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/12236 for more information.