If you are using Podman Desktop, you are in fact using a combination of 2 tools. One is Podman, an open source container, pod, and container image management engine.
The other is Podman Desktop itself which is a graphical layer on top of Podman (and other container engines).
This means that you can use different versions of Podman in combination with different versions of Podman Desktop. For example, as you can see in the screenshot below I’m using version 5.2.0 of Podman whereas my Podman Desktop version is v1.12.0.
Error: vm "podman-machine-default" already exists on hypervisor
Today after upgrading Podman, Podman Desktop started to return the following error message when I tried to initialize the podman virtual machine:
Error: vm "podman-machine-default" already exists on hypervisor
I tried to fix it by removing the virtual machine distribution from wsl:
wsl --unregister podman-machine-default
When I tried to initialize the podman virtual machine again, it failed again but with a different error message:
Error extracting compressed file: \"unexpected EOF\"" Error: unexpected EOF
To fix that problem I had to reset the virtual machine:
podman.exe machine reset
Warning: this command will delete all existing Podman machines and all of the configuration and data directories for Podman machines
The following machine(s) will be deleted:
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N]
Now I could re-download and initialize the virtual machine successfully:
podman.exe machine init
Downloading VM image: v20240728061533-5.1-rootfs-amd64.tar.zst: done
Extracting compressed file: podman-machine-default-amd64: done
Importing operating system into WSL (this may take a few minutes on a new WSL install)...
Import in progress, this may take a few minutes.
The operation completed successfully.
Configuring system... Machine init complete
To start your machine run: podman machine start