Anyway

(Or, as it’s com­monly known, yak shaving.)

In this case, to be able to use a Dock­er image, the easy way to install soft­ware (I’m told). But, of course, tech­no­logy has a habit of throw­ing curve balls. Or, as here, demand­ing items that you may not have.

Step One: Check­ing the require­ments for Dock­er reveals that, if you’re using Win­dows, you need a Win­dows 10 Pro install­a­tion, not Win­dows 10 Home. There is, how­ever, a Dock­er Tool­box option for Win­dows 10 Home. The require­ment for Dock­er Tool­box includes vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion being enabled. (There’s a link to a tool to check this.) My Win­dows PC, a couple of years old, has that vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion, but it’s disabled.

The word­ing on the Dock­er Tool­box page makes it sound like using the full Dock­er Desktop would be prefer­able, so I decided to check out that option. Microsoft does make it easy to spend the money to upgrade to Win­dows 10 Pro (there’s a link in the Set­tings app under About with the word “Upgrade”), but the require­ments for Dock­er Desktop include sup­port for some­thing called “Second Level Address Trans­la­tion (SLAT)”, which seems to be called some­thing dif­fer­ent any­where you might want to check it. In the Win­dows sys­tem inform­a­tion (sys­teminfo) it’s called Hyper‑V, for example, and check­ing it reveals that in my sys­tem it’s sup­por­ted, but not enabled.

Step two: Enable vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion; this requires a reboot and change to the sys­tem BIOS set­tings. This page on how to access the BIOS on Win­dows 10 was use­ful. Once enabled, everything seems good to go, and from there I decided to try out the tool­box first, and think about the lar­ger upgrade later. I’m not crazy about poten­tially break­ing work­ing sys­tems if I can avoid it, and past Win­dows upgrades have made me cautious.

Step three: Install Dock­er Tool­box, which went smoothly enough. But the pro­gram I was try­ing to run had issues with port map­ping. A pos­sible cause is some­thing in the Dock­er sys­tem not talk­ing to the Win­dows sys­tem in the expec­ted way, so it looks like I will need the full Dock­er Desktop after all. Which means upgrad­ing Windows.

Step four: Delete Dock­er Tool­box from the sys­tem to make sure there are no weird interactions.

Step five: Sign up for a Microsoft account, so that I can buy Win­dows 10 Pro.

Step six: Install Win­dows 10 Pro as an upgrade to Win­dows 10 Home. This went much faster than I expec­ted and appar­ently did­n’t break any­thing either.

Step sev­en: Install Dock­er Desktop and repeat all the soft­ware-depend­ent install­a­tion steps.

Suc­cess! The port map­ping works, and the required soft­ware installed.

Tech­no­logy is great, except when it isn’t. But Win­dows 10 is much bet­ter than pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Windows.