Distrobox 1.8 toolkit has been released, enabling users to quickly install and run any Linux distribution in a container and ensure its integration with the main system. The project's code is written in Shell and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
The project provides an overlay on Docker, Podman, or Lilipod and is characterized by maximum simplification of the operation and integration of the launched environment with the rest of the system. To create an environment with a different distribution, simply execute the single command distrobox-create without worrying about the details. After launching, Distrobox ensures the home directory of the user is forwarded to the container, setting up 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 supports the use of 26 distributions as host systems, 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, users can work completely within 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:
- Integration with NVIDIA GPUs has been improved.
- Management of the XDG_DATA_DIRS and XDG_DATA_HOME environment variables has been enhanced.
- Support has been added for specifying external ini-files containing container configuration (manifest) for the 'distrobox assemble' command. For example, 'distrobox assemble create —file https://foo.com/file.ini'.
- Support has been added for running the Universal Blue distribution and system images toolbx-images in containers.
- Support for new versions of Fedora, Ubuntu, Alpine, and Wolfi has been added.
Source: opennet.ru
