How to get Vagrant running under Windows 11
I recently started working for a large organization with a very secure Windows 11 laptop. It’s so secure, in fact, that it’s unsuitable for software development (my kind of development: Linux and Emacs).
I first tried downloading Emacs for Windows and I kept getting this “this software is not frequently downloaded” and I couldn’t install it.
I’ve used Vagrant successfully in the past; A coworker said he’d never gotten it running on anything but Linux and suggested Oracle Virtualbox.
This would have eventually worked (I think), but Oracle changes the command line for the ‘Vboxmanage’ command one has to use.
It’s been a while since I used a Windows machine for development and I forgot about “Run as Administrator” … unfortunately there’s one obscuring feature of this Windows that distracted me for maybe 1/2 hour:
If one does this as a Bing search instead of searching one’s apps, it comes up as a web app it wants to have you install on the browser: “Power Automate” …
I finally got to the Run as Administrator and started to make progress.
I found a Ubuntu image to download: dstoliker/cured-ubuntu2004.
I ran vagrant up and it finally worked … with one more glitch.
I ran vagrant ssh to log in and then did sudo apt update as normal, but the command timed out on us.archive.ubuntu.com.
I ran nslookup on this host and I got from the corporate DNS: DNS request timed out (I gather they block external DNS servers)
I changed the DNS on Windows to Google’s: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 … I tried nslookup again with the same (lack of results).
I rebooted the Windows machine and tried this again. Still no go.
I finally logged into the Vagrant box and changed /etc/resolv.conf to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and finally this was the step that worked.
I hope this is helpful for anyone else trying to get this working!
