I'm fairly familiar with BOINC, having installed it about a million times over the years, but I find the BUDA/WSL2/Podman enable/install process complicated. I know this is an area of active development and so presumably will get easier, but for me the main challenge isn't following steps, it's knowing which steps have worked and which still need to be completed, without looking through the logs which can't be expected of most people.

So my request, aside from automating what you can and preusmably are working on, is to have a checklist in BOINC manager, that shows what is working and what isn't for BUDA - e.g.:
Virtualisation working?
Docker/Podman detected?
WSL enabled?
Etc.

And maybe some CPU, RAM and GPU info

Is that doable, and if so, is it something others would find helpful?

Cheers,
Danny

To be honest, at the moment, I wouldn't bother with PODMAN or docker. So few projects use it that you are probably better off sticking with Virtual Box for those that use that. I stopped using it because it has conflicts with VB and I wanted to run Windows tasks using VB for my main two projects.

Ok, I'll leave it until it's more mature. I used it for the CPDN tasks that were Linux-only and needed 26GB RAM each so I used WSL2 but it was quite painful!

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I have to agree. BUDA is a broken process. If you need Docker, then somebody needs to come up with a reliable process to install and configure whatever it needs. Anybody that typically uses Docker in a Windows environment, typically has Docker Desktop installed. BOINC should be able to detect it and use it without any fanfare.

In reply to tgm's message of 11 Jan 2026:

I have to agree. BUDA is a broken process. If you need Docker, then somebody needs to come up with a reliable process to install and configure whatever it needs. Anybody that typically uses Docker in a Windows environment, typically has Docker Desktop installed. BOINC should be able to detect it and use it without any fanfare.

We do detect Docker Desktop if it's configured properly.
Also, specifically for this purpose we have developed our own installer that configures everything: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc-buda-runner-wsl-installer/releases/latest
Soon it will be a part of the general BOINC installer.

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BOINC maintainer.
For any insight, check my BOINC Development Blog.

I don't know about with Windows but I wouldn't want that on Linux with the conflict with VB. Currently there are many more projects using VB than Docker.

In reply to Dave's message of 11 Jan 2026:

I don't know about with Windows but I wouldn't want that on Linux with the conflict with VB. Currently there are many more projects using VB than Docker.

Then just don't use it.
LHC@home-dev has a test application for Docker, and we really hope it will replace VBox in the future, since Docker has some advantages that make it better than VBox.
But at the moment you are willing yo use whatever you want.

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BOINC maintainer.
For any insight, check my BOINC Development Blog.