Claude Science (operon) — WSL2 Setup

Unofficial, community-maintained setup scripts. This repo is not published by Anthropic. It automates the local setup of Claude Science (the operon daemon) on Windows via WSL2. It does not contain or redistribute the operon binary itself — download that directly from the official page linked above.

What you need to do first

1. Download the Linux installer from the official page: https://claude.com/product/claude-science (Do not download it from anywhere else, and don't pick a macOS/Windows build — this setup is for WSL2, so you need the Linux download. It's a single file named operon, no extension. Some platform labels on that page have been inconsistent, so verify the link actually points to a Linux build before downloading.)
2. Confirm your environment:
   • From Windows (PowerShell or Command Prompt), before opening a Linux shell:

     wsl --list --verbose

     This lists each installed distro and its version:

       NAME      STATE           VERSION
     * Ubuntu    Running         2
     

     The VERSION column must say 2. If it says 1, run wsl --set-version <DistroName> 2. If wsl isn't recognized at all, run wsl --install and reboot. To open that distro's Linux shell, just type wsl (or open it from the Start menu).
   • Once inside the Linux shell, double-check from there too:
     • uname -r — output should contain WSL2
     • lsb_release -rs — Ubuntu 20.04 or newer
3. Install build dependencies — these require your sudo password, so run them yourself in a WSL2 terminal:

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install -y meson ninja-build libcap-dev git pkg-config socat

Then, with Claude Code

Open a Claude Code session in your WSL2 terminal and run:

/install-claude-science

This walks through the remaining steps automatically: installing the operon binary to your PATH, building bubblewrap ≥0.8.0 from source if your Ubuntu version ships an older one (it will pause and ask you to run the sudo ninja ... install step yourself), starting the daemon, and printing a login URL to open in your browser.

See commands/install-claude-science.md for the full instructions if you want to read or run them manually instead.

Optional: one-click launcher (Windows)

/install-claude-science is everything you need — once it's done, operon serve --no-browser --detached and operon url in a WSL2 terminal are all it takes to start it up again later.

If you'd rather not open a terminal each time, just ask Claude Code (in the same session, after setup finishes) to generate a .bat launcher for you. It's not a file shipped in this repo — Claude Code generates it on the spot, tailored to your actual WSL distro name and a verified path to the operon binary, which avoids the "wrong default distro" and "PATH not resolving in a non-interactive shell" problems a generic pre-made script would run into. See the "Optional: generate a Windows one-click launcher" section in commands/install-claude-science.md for exactly what it does.

Security notes

• operon bundles its own agent/code-execution runtime (it spawns Python and executes code, not just a passive viewer). The sandbox — bubblewrap ≥0.8.0 plus socat — is what contains that runtime's filesystem and network access.
• Never run it with --dangerously-no-sandbox. That flag grants the daemon full read/write access to your home directory and unrestricted network access (equivalent to --dangerously-skip-permissions in Claude Code). If you hit a sandbox error, fix the underlying dependency (see Troubleshooting in the command file) instead of disabling the sandbox.
• Only download operon from the official Anthropic page. This repo intentionally does not host or mirror the binary.

Troubleshooting

See the Troubleshooting section in commands/install-claude-science.md — it covers the bubblewrap version error, the missing-socat error, PATH issues, and a couple of Windows batch-script encoding bugs we hit and fixed during development.

License

The setup scripts and documentation in this repository are licensed under the MIT License. This does not cover the operon binary itself, which is not distributed here — download it from the official page above and refer to its own licensing terms.