Help for windows users

Setup

CPlantBox can only be run on a linux operating system. If you use windows you can:

1. Set up a virtual machine
2. Set up a Windows Subsystem for Linux
   1. Follow this WSL2 installation tutorial made by the DuMux developers
   2. To use GUI applications, you can follow the instructions in this archived tutorial. Many CPlantBox scripts will hang if you do not have a GUI application.

Maintenance

If you have an adaptive memory allocation for the WSL, the space taken by the WSL will increase according to its need but will not be able to release the memory on its own. If you lack storage on your machine:

1. delete heaving files in the WSL
2. in windows, open the powershell.
3. run wsl --shutdown
4. Find the path to your wsl space. It should be something like: C:\Users<your name>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu20.04onWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx
5. save the file in an external drive as backup
6. Option 1: run from powershell Optimize-VHD -Path C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu24.04LTS_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx -Mode Full. This should free the unused memory.
   Option 2:

diskpart
# open window Diskpart
select vdisk file="C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu24.04LTS_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx"
attach vdisk readonly
compact vdisk
detach vdisk
exit

Moreover, WSL can store a lot of files in the folder C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Local\Temp/wsl-crashes (more than 20GB). You can manually delte those files by opnening PowerShell in administrator mode and runnin: Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Local\Temp\wsl-crashes\*" -Recurse -Force