Portable Unprivileged NeuroDesktop

An unprivileged option for running NeuroDesktop without Docker or Podman.

Installing TinyRange manually is for advanced users only. These instructions should be used as a supplement to running NeurodeskApp.

Minimum System Requirements

At least 5GB free space for neurodesktop base image
At least 8GB of RAM

Downloading TinyRange

TinyRange (https://github.com/tinyrange/tinyrange) is a lightweight runtime for running Virtual Machines and Containers. It runs without admin privileges and doesn’t need Docker or Podman installed to work.

Downlaod the latest version of TinyRange from: https://github.com/tinyrange/tinyrange/releases/latest

Windows on ARM: TinyRange is not currently supported on Windows for ARM (Copilot+ Laptops with ARM64/Snapdragon CPUs)

Installing TinyRange

Unzip the archive to some local path on your computer. It’s recommended not to extract it to a network drive.
Open a terminal in the extracted archive and run ./tinyrange login or tinyrange login on Windows.
Once you see the tinyrange:~# type exit.

Enabling Hardware Acceleration

Windows: This might require admin privileges in some cases. Search in your start menu for “Turn Windows features on or off.”. Find “Hyper-V Hypervisor” or “Windows Hypervisor Platform” and make sure it’s enabled. Alternatively, run dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:"HypervisorPlatform" in an Administrator shell. Then restart your computer. To test if it’s working correctly run: tinyrange.exe env check-hv
Ubuntu/Other Linux: It should already work out of the box. If not make sure your user account has permission to read/write /dev/kvm.
MacOS: No extra steps required. It already works.