Published tools Distrobox 1.6, which allows 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 by licensed under GPLv3.
The project provides an add-on for Docker, Podman or Lilipod, and is characterized by maximum simplification of work and integration of the running environment with the rest of the system. To create an environment with another distribution, just run one distrobox-create command without thinking about the intricacies. After launching, Distrobox forwards the user’s home directory to the container, configures access to the X11 and Wayland server to run graphical applications from the container, allows you to connect external drives, adds audio output, and implements integration at the SSH agent, D-Bus and udev levels.
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Distrobox claims to be able to be used as a host system 25 distributions, including Alpine, Manjaro, Gentoo, EndlessOS, NixOS, Void, Arch, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL and Fedora. Can be run in a container any distribution for which there are images in OCI format. After installation, the user can fully work in another distribution without leaving the main system.
The main areas of application include experiments with atomically updated distributions, such as Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS and SteamOS3, creation of separate isolated environments (for example, to run a home configuration on a work laptop), access to more recent versions of applications from experimental branches of distributions .
In the new release:
- Added toolkit support for managing isolated containers lilipod, developed by the author Distrobox. The toolkit allows you to download and unpack container images in OCI format from various repositories, manage images, and also create and run containers from the resulting images. The lilipod command line interface is as close as possible to Podman, Docker and Nerdctl, but differs in its focus on simplicity and minimalism (only the most necessary functions are supported).
Containers are created to run under a single user with file system isolation using mount point namespaces (optional network, pid and ipc namespaces can be used). Additional restrictions set through seccomp, capabilities and cgroups are not supported. Lilipod is positioned as a built-in fallback toolkit for Distrobox, used when the system does not have 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.
- Improved work with the user’s command shell inside the container.
- In containers with root rights, the user password is correctly configured to run the sudo utility.
- Improved support for containers with their own initialization system (initful). Added the ability to use the OpenRC initialization system. Provided support for systemd-based user sessions.
- To the team”distrobox create” added new options “–unshare-all”, “–unshare-netns”, “–unshare-process” and “–unshare-devsys”.
- It is possible to use containers launched in initful and unshare-all modes in environments based on LXC and Libvirt.
- Added container_additional_volumes configuration parameter to specify which mount points are used in containers.
- Provided the ability to run exported binary files in different DistroBox environments.
- In a team “distrobox assemble” Support for all options of the “distrobox create” command has been implemented. The ability to export applications and binary files directly from the manifest has been implemented.
- Problems with setting the time zone have been resolved.
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