ParrotWSL

ParrotOS on WSL2

Here's the thing... I went scouring the Internet to find some way to put ParrotOS on WSL2 and I found a couple of scripts, another couple of guides; but the apt sources were old, the tools were deprecated, and there were just a lot of tweaks/further debugging that needed to be done in order to get the thing right speed. Plus, you had to start with an Ubuntu/Debian/Kali distro anyway which to me didn't seem like the right answer.

As much as I would like to take credit for this super straight-forward simple way of installing... really any distro your little heart desires {yea you, I'm talking about your little heart buddy}, I just ganked this from the Microsoft documentation found here. So I shant toot my own horn. I don't know why it took me so damn long to read the documentation but I figured I'm not the only one, so here we are.

What's that? Shut the Fv*k up and get on with it? Right Right Right... my bad.

Prerequisites

1. There are a million and one guides out there on how to install WSL2. Like this one, that one, or this other(for those of you who like the motion picture formats). So if you don't have that done, it's kinda necessary.
   • Next
2. You need to Head over to the Website of Docker and follow thier guide on setting up Docker Desktop with WSL2 backend. There are obvious workarounds for this which... I suppose may be worth getting into later but for now, if you can, do the do and install the thing.
   • Meat & Potatoes

Get yourself a hot-n-ready tar'd ParrotOS

Now I imagine that there are a ton of ways to go about this. Heck, I even did you a solid and got one here for ya. But for the sake of learnin you one, we'll go through the steps anyway.

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So the easiest way (besides getting yours here) to get a ParrotOS tar file of the entire image is to compress a container. I highly encourage you to head over to the ParrotSec website to view their latest Downloads. Here is their official Docker documentation where you will find 2 containers. Again - I highly recommend that you go check it out.

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1. Open your WSL2 CLI (bash or whatevs) in a distro you've already got installed.

2. In WSL you are going to start Docker

sudo service docker start

3. Pick one of the following container templates and spin it up.
   • I recommend rolling up the smallest image since you will be able to update and customize once everything is installed

Core Template:

Parrot.run/Core

Core system with just the Parrot basics. You can use it as a start point to create your custom containers. This image is multiarch, and works for amd64, arm64 and armhf architectures.

Launch the container

docker run -t parrotsec/core bash

Security Template

Parrot.run/sec

This container includes a huge collection of tools that can be used via command line from inside a docker container. Some tools with graphical interface were excluded for obvious reasons. This container ships with the following metapackages: -parrot-cloud

Launch the container

docker run -t parrotsec/security bash

4. Get the image's container ID and save it as a variable

dockerContainerID=$(docker container ls -a | grep -i parrot | awk '{print $1}')

5. Export your image to the Windows file system

docker export $dockerContainerID > /mnt/c/temp/ParrotOS.tar

All that so you can import the tar file as an image into WSL2

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Import ParrotOS tar file into WSL

1. Open yourself a powershell instance and get to your directory and make a folder to install your Distro.

cd
mkdir WSLdistro

2. move into your new directory Import your tar file into WSL2. Syntax is important here '''wsl --import

cd WSLdistro
wsl --import ParrotSec .\ "C:\temp\ParrotOS.tar"

3. Check installed distros

wsl -l -v

4. Launch that nizbich

wsl -d ParrotOS

Extras in this Repository

Check out the Docs folder. There are a few things in there which help out post import. Some dot files, and wsl config files. If they help, cool, if not.. no sweat.