Distrobox 1.7 has been released, offering a solution for quickly installing and running any Linux distribution within a container with seamless integration into the main system. The project, coded in Shell, is distributed under the gplv3 license.
This project serves as a layer over Docker, Podman, or Lilipod, focusing on simplifying the process of setting up and integrating the isolated environment with the rest of the system. With just one command, “Distrobox-Create,” users can effortlessly create an environment with a different distribution without worrying about the complexities. Distrobox then grants access to the user’s home directory within the container, configures access to graphical servers like X11 and Wayland for running graphic applications, enables the connection of external drives, includes sound output, and integrates with SSH agent, d-Bus, and UDEV.
Distrobox supports 25 different distributions as host systems, including Alpine, Manjaro, Gentoo, Endless OS, NIXOS, VOID, Arch, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and Fedora. Users can launch containers with any distribution available in OCI format, allowing them to seamlessly switch between different environments without leaving the main system.
Common use cases for Distrobox include experimenting with atomic update distributions like Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, and SteamOS 3, creating isolated environments for specific tasks, and testing branches of different distributions.
In the latest release, several improvements have been made:
- Added the option “–enter-flags” to indicate additional flags when launching Distrobox using Distrobox-export.
- Included options “–hostname” and “–unshare-gramps” in Distrobox-create for setting hostname and disabling group sharing.
- Enhanced support for Login Shell and SystemD in containers.