A toolkit for Distrobox 1.6 has been released, allowing you to quickly install and run any Linux distribution in a container while integrating it with the main system. The project's code is written in Shell and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
The project provides an extension over Docker, Podman, or Lilipod, and is characterized by maximum simplification of operations and integration of the launched environment with the rest of the system. To create an environment with another distribution, simply execute the command distrobox-create without worrying about the details. After launching, Distrobox ensures the home directory of the user is passed into the container and configures access to server X11 and Wayland for executing graphical applications from the container, allows the connection of external drives, adds sound output, and implements integration at the level of the SSH agent, D-Bus, and udev.
Distrobox claims the ability to use 25 distributions as a host system, including Alpine, Manjaro, Gentoo, EndlessOS, NixOS, Void, Arch, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and Fedora. Any distribution with OCI format images can be run in the container. After installation, the user can work fully in another distribution without leaving the main system.
The main areas of application include experiments with atomically updatable distributions, such as Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, and SteamOS3, creating separate isolated environments (for example, for running a home configuration on a work laptop), and accessing newer versions of applications from experimental branches of distributions.
In the new release:
- Support for the lilipod toolkit for managing isolated containers, developed by the author of Distrobox, has been added. The toolkit allows you to download and unpack OCI format container images from various repositories, manage images, and create and run containers from the obtained images. The lilipod command-line interface is designed to be as close as possible to Podman, Docker, and Nerdctl, but focuses on simplicity and minimalism (only the most essential functions are supported).
Containers are created to run under a separate user with file system isolation using mount namespace (optional network, pid, and ipc namespaces can be used). Additional restrictions set via seccomp, capabilities, and cgroups are not supported. Lilipod is positioned as a built-in backup toolkit for Distrobox, used when the system lacks more functional container managers. The toolkit is built using static linking and is not tied to external dependencies.
- Improved integration with NVIDIA technologies such as CUDA.
- Improved initialization process.
- Enhanced user shell functionality within the container.
- In root-privileged containers, correct configuration of the user password for running the sudo utility is ensured.
- Enhanced support for containers with their own initialization system (initful). Added support for using the OpenRC initialization system. User sessions based on systemd are also supported.
- New options ‘—unshare-all’, ‘—unshare-netns’, ‘—unshare-process’, and ‘—unshare-devsys’ have been added to the ‘distrobox create’ command.
- Containers running in initful and unshare-all modes can now be used in LXC and Libvirt-based environments.
- A configuration parameter container_additional_volumes has been added to specify the mount points used in containers.
- The ability to run exported binaries in different DistroBox environments has been provided.
- The ‘distrobox assemble’ command now supports all options from the ‘distrobox create’ command. It is now possible to export applications and binaries directly from the manifest.
- Issues with setting the timezone have been resolved.
Source: opennet.ru
