distrobox-1.4.1

[dreadbird]

Updated use of distrobox

remember we created an overlay for our containers in partitions? this is a good idea because you can dismount and mount in another OS and use your containers.

I have just discovered that you can make a symlink to rootless containers on your porteus drive.

cd ~/.local/share

sudo mountpoint containers

is not a mountpoint
(if it is) sudo umount containers

rm -r containers

mkdir /mnt/sda1/containers/

(remember our pwd is /home/guest/.local/share)

ln -s /mnt/sda1/containers/
(this will make a sym link from /home/guest/.local/share to /mnt/sda1)

distrobox create
now distrobox will automatically create a rootless container on /mnt/sda1



What use is this? im going to introduce you to something really useful boxbuddy

boxbuddy only works with rootless containers. we can install boxbuddy as a flatpak and there by accessing our rootless containers!


so you will have /mnt/sda1/containers <------------- rootless for use on your porteus install
/mnt/sda2/containers <------------- rootless if you decide to automount
/mnt/sda3/containers <------------- root 

Now boxbuddy can detect your distrobox containers in ~/



---> Important <---
its a symlink so you dont want changes exit saving it.

go to /etc/changes-exit.conf

!/home/guest/.local/share/containers

copy the symlink to /mnt/sda1/changes/home/guest/.local/share/


or to avoid all that just use seperate mounts for rootless and root

only applies for changes:EXIT



Boxbuddy uses

Immediately open a terminal inside said container
Show applications installed (via distrobox-export --app geany) in said containers

Create containers from a list of provided images

In other words it makes using distrobox a 1 click



Flatpack instructions

#we want the application to go to /home/guest/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/

export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/home/guest/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share:/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share:/usr/local/share:/usr/share"

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists --user flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak install boxbuddy

if anything asks select 2 user


Other useful things I found

distrobox installs an icon in the menu of your container! you may not see it until reboot. but I have myfedora icon with the fedora logo and it opens the terminal in the container.



Flatpak for porteus 5.1 is available by a user on the forum. viewtopic.php?p=101652#p101652
you also need dconf-0.40.0-x86_64-1 through slapt-mod -m dconf

[dreadbird]

I posted on linuxquestions.org
https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... ost6554181

to reach out about the best setup (configs) for podman. do we need catatonit init? are we missing something?

can confirm fuse-overlayfs is for older kernels and podman uses the native overlay. it will default look for fuse overlayfs if on an older machine

so effectively solve the problem about no official setup. you wouldnt believe the amount of errors I saw . we very well could be missing that one thing. I will be working steadily on cobbling together a docker image of porteus so you can go in and grab packages through there to experiment if you wanted.

If I find out anything new with containers that can be useful I will post it here

[dreadbird]

Podman 5.4.0 xzm
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18GQk0U ... drive_link

took the static binaries applied same config from 5.3.1.
source
https://github.com/mgoltzsche/podman-static

these binaries were made to run in containers on alpine images. They work without system which is good. I went through all the dependencies and from what I gather of catatonit is not a dependency. it is for the docker or podman --init command for initful containers. Also for pods or running multiple containers together which is a stacked application. So what catatonit does is create a reaper process with an ID of 1. I also believe initful containers isolate themselves from the host so this isnt what we want.

Also pods or Kubernetes require far too much skill and is counter productive. So with this .xzm being the latest version of podman and works on porteus 5.1

[dreadbird]

I havent gone too far into containers since getting the basics up. Its fairly complicated and the uses just arent practical for the average user like myself. I did find one application that can fix issues with software that doesnt work out of the box. Lets take a program that doesnt work for various reasons.


Application of containers

Have you heard of flaresolverr? its an application on windows that used to work. However something breaks it either windows 11 or something changed in the code and the developer never updated it. This is likely do to the challenges being changed by other sites. I even turned headless mode off in windows and chrome launches and just crashes for no reason.

On windows there is something going on where it detects a challenge and it gets some weird 505 error and fails. So I looked into docker containers

I looked through several forums with different alternatives and then someone posted that this container works. So I tried it out

Confirmed works:
alexfozor/flaresolverr:pr-1300-experimental



podman pull alexfozor/flaresolverr:pr-1300-experimental

podman image list <---------- get image id
podman run -it -p 8191:8191 imageid <------- whatever image id you have


get the jackett binary at https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
cd into the directory in my case its /Downloads
./jackett



http://127.0.0.1:8191 <------- you flaresolver proxy


This is another instance where containers are very useful. Its an entire os with chrome already installed in the images and also having the updated code to work properly. In two commands you can have a working flaresolver proxy.