Recently, I started to face an awkward situation trying to install Ubuntu inside WSL2. I have been using it for years, and recently, after installing Docker Desktop, my WSL2 setup started to misbehave.
I run SEVERAL attempts, trying to isolate the problem. I found that can I install Debian or a few other distros w/o any trouble, including Ubuntu-20.04 LTS.
However, if I try to install 22.04 or 24.04, the system hangs right after "Installing, this may take a few minutes...". This is a common problem all over the internet, with different solutions. The "Control-C" worked only once. What happens is that Win10 partially freezes, not opening any other new process, and still allowing me to use any other opened application.
This hang lasts around 8-10 minutes. After that, I can play mostly with everything, except WSL if that install attempt is still "in progress".
Every time I try, something different happens. I realized that some lock/race is happening, after I saw this error, that only happened twice. For this to happen, I leave the machine for 10-20 minutes, and all clicks I made "go through", and some apps do open then. So I was able to get to powershell and do a "wsl --shutdown", which didn't freeze. As a result, on the original Ubuntu installation, I can read:
Launching Ubuntu 22.04 LTSInstalling, this may take a few minutes...failed to read passwd database:terminated due timed out-1ERROR: couldn't find any users in NSS databaseAnd then was asking me to provide a user/password.
In all times I ended aborting the setup due to the freeze (button hard reset), WSL ended claiming that Ubuntu was already installed, and if I could manage it to start, I was just root user. That led me to believe that right before asking the user creation, the setup process was getting locked, and partially freezing Win10.
Still unclear about why is this happening, but I exhausted my possibilities. Did VPN on/off, anti-virus on/off, other software on/off, completely removed and reinstalled WSL...
Any clues?