WSL Edition

Installing ParrotOS on Windows-Subsystem-Linux (henceforth WSL)

Note about Virtualized Machines

This is not intended, or supported to be ran within a Virtualized Windows Machine.

Any bugs or issues resulting from this are most likely not going to be fixed.

TL;DR, Virtualized Windows Machine - You're on your own.

Installing WSL

If you already have WSL installed on your machine, you can skip this section.

Open up a Powershell as administrator (Right click -> Run As Administrator), and type wsl --install. If you see help text, that means you have WSL already installed, otherwise wait for the install to finish.

Running Parrot WSL

Manual Install

Download the ZIP file containing the needed files from https://www.parrotsec.org/download/, and extract it to a folder.

Double click launcher.exe and the installation window will pop up.

First, enter y or n to choose to install all the security tools, or just the base image (this can be done later). Next, enter your username & password for your user account.

Your WSL "Hard Drive" will be created as a .vdhx in the folder you create the launcher from.

All updates can be performed via a standard apt upgrade/update. However, if you wish to rerun the installer, you must run wsl --unregister ParrotOS, and rerun launcher.exe

Congrats, you now have a working WSL instance!

Windows Store

Coming soon....

Known Issues

Packages requiring SystemD(i.e. Powershell Empire) are not working on default installs.

This can be fixed however, by editing /etc/wsl.conf and adding

[boot]
systemd=true

And restarting your wsl instance.

Unknown Issues

Please open an issue in The WSL Gitlab Project for any bugs you encounter.