rancher-desktop: Rancher Desktop V 1.7.0 fails to start on Windows 11

Actual Behavior

Install rancher desktop with Rancher.Desktop.Setup.1.7.0.msi.
Launch Rancher Desktop. Nothing appears to happen.

Steps to Reproduce

I did some troubleshooting and looked at the log files. There appears to be a problem with an existing WSL distribution that was already installed on my machine.

I would like to configure rancher desktop to ignore that distribution.

Result

When I run Rancher Desktop from a terminal window I see the following

PS C:\Program Files\Rancher Desktop> (node:6768) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: C:\WINDOWS\system32\wsl.exe exited with code 1 at ChildProcess.<anonymous> (C:\Program Files\Rancher Desktop\resources\app.asar\dist\app\background.js:1:7721) at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:390:28) at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:290:12) (Use Rancher Desktop --trace-warnings ... to show where the warning was created) (node:6768) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection. This error originated either by throwing inside of an async function without a catch block, or by rejecting a promise which was not handled with .catch(). To terminate the node process on unhandled promise rejection, use the CLI flag --unhandled-rejections=strict (see https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#cli_unhandled_rejections_mode). (rejection id: 1) background.log integrations.log wsl-helper.chrome.log update.log server.log k8s.log dashboardServer.log

Expected Behavior

Rancher Desktop GUI opens up and informs me that it had issues opening existing WSL distributions.

Additional Information

No response

Rancher Desktop Version

1.7.0

Rancher Desktop K8s Version

latest

Which container engine are you using?

containerd (nerdctl)

What operating system are you using?

Windows

Operating System / Build Version

Windows 11 Pro 22H2 OS Build 22621.1105

What CPU architecture are you using?

x64

Linux only: what package format did you use to install Rancher Desktop?

None

Windows User Only

No response

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created a year ago
Reactions: 2
Comments: 17 (8 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@gunamata I agree with @jandubois.
Putting a try catch/block around your startup scripts and then ignoring distributions that throw errors is the best approach.

I have figured out how to reproduce this error.

Upgrade to the Microsoft store WSL. The command wsl --version should indicate version 1.0.x
install an ubuntu distribution from the Microsoft store. (I had ubuntu 20.04, but I think 22.04 will have the same behavior)
add (or edit) /etc/wsl.config with the following: [automount] enabled = false

[interop] enabled = false appendWindowsPath = false

exit your WSL instance and restart it. You should see WSL (8) ERROR: CreateProcessParseCommon
exit your WSL instance.
Launch Rancher Desktop and then examine the log files.

markarnott on Jan 27, 2023