The Distrobox 1.4 toolkit has been published, allowing you to quickly install and run any Linux distribution in a container and ensure its integration with the main system. The project code is written in Shell and distributed under the GPLv3 license.
The project provides an add-on over Docker or Podman, and is distinguished by the maximum simplification of work and integration of the running environment with the rest of the system. To create an environment with a different distribution, it is enough to issue a single distrobox-create command, without thinking about the subtleties. After launch, Distrobox forwards the user's home directory to the container, configures access to the X11 and Wayland server to execute from the container of graphical applications, allows you to connect external drives, adds sound output, implements integration at the level of SSH agent, D-Bus and udev.
Distrobox claims to be able to host 17 distributions, including Alpine, Manjaro, Gentoo, EndlessOS, NixOS, Void, Arch, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and Fedora. Any distribution kit for which there are images in the OCI format can be launched in the container. After installation, the user can fully work in another distribution without leaving the main system.
Among the main areas of application are experiments with atomically updated distributions, such as Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS and SteamOS3, the creation of separate isolated environments (for example, to run home configuration on a work laptop), access to more recent versions of applications from experimental branches of distributions .
In the new release:
- Added "distrobox upgrade" command to update the contents of all installed containers with distributions at once.
- Added "distrobox generate-entry" command to add a distrobox-based environment to the application list.
- Added "distrobox ephemeral" command to create a disposable container that will be deleted after the session associated with it ends.
- Added install-podman script to install the Podman toolkit to the home directory without affecting the system environment (useful for environments where system directories are read-only mounted or not editable).
- Improved support for host systems with Guix and Nix package managers.
- Improved support for LDAP, Active Directory, and Kerberos authentication.
Source: opennet.ru