Score:1

"An install, uninstall, or conversion is in progress for this distribution"

az flag

In an attempt to install WSL and Ubuntu, when I enter the install command, "wsl --install", instead of asking me to create a username and password, it shows: "An install, uninstall, or conversion is in progress for this distribution." How do I complete the installation process from there?

Score:1
vn flag

This can be a tough one to resolve, as (according to the lead WSL developer here) it indicates that the WSL service likely crashed while the Ubuntu distribution was being installed, leaving it in a bad state.

Hopefully, just unregistering Ubuntu and trying again will work, but if WSL is crashing due to some system issue, then it may happen again.

Let's start with, from PowerShell (regular user, not admin):

wsl --shutdown
wsl -l -v
  • Confirm the name of the distribution, likely "Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu-22.04"

  • Note: the following will destroy all data in the existing distribution, which shouldn't be a problem since it never completed in the first place. However, just make sure that you are unregistering the proper distribution if you have more than one.

wsl --unregister <distribution_name> 
  • Go to the Microsoft Store, find Windows Subsystem for Linux there. If not installed, install it -- It's the latest release.

  • Go to the Microsoft Store, find "Ubuntu" (no version) or "Ubuntu 22.04" and trying installing from there.

If the problem reoccurs, see this comment and check the group policy settings.

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.