Podman Desktop is unable to initialize

Question

After installing Podman Desktop on Windows and trying to initialize podman machine, the process stops at "initializing" status (no error).

When trying to manually ininitialize the machine (via CLI), an error is returned:

error: package permissions restore of shadow-utils on guest os failed: exit status 0xffffffff

or

error: the WSL import of guest OS failed

Answer 1

I managed to solved my issue with the info described at https://www.techtutsonline.com/install-podman-in-windows/#Troubleshooting

wsl --set-default-version 2
wsl --unregister podman-machine-default
wsl --shutdown
podman machine init

If that doesn't work, try this with a full restart and retry the command above (I needed this command).

netsh winsock reset