• Distrobox
  • Compatibility
    • Supported container managers
    • Host Distros
      • Compatibility notes
      • Non shared mounts
      • List of distributions including distrobox in their repositories
      • New Host Distro support
    • Containers Distros
      • New Distro support
      • Older distributions

Compatibility

This project does not need a dedicated image. It can use any OCI images from docker-hub, quay.io, or any registry of your choice.

Many cloud images are stripped down on purpose to save size and may not include commands such as which, mount, less or vi). Additional packages can be installed once inside the container. We recommend using your preferred automation tool inside the container if you find yourself having to repeatedly create new containers. Maintaining your own custom image is also an option.

The main concern is having basic Linux utilities (mount), basic user management utilities (usermod, passwd), and sudo correctly set.

Supported container managers

distrobox can run on either podman, docker or lilipod

It depends either on podman configured in rootless mode or on docker configured without sudo (follow THESE instructions)

• Minimum podman version: 2.1.0
• Minimum docker client version: 19.03.15
• Minimum lilipod version: v0.0.1

Follow the official installation guide here:

• https://podman.io/getting-started/installation
• https://docs.docker.com/engine/install
• https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/

Host Distros

Distrobox has been successfully tested on:

Compatibility notes

Non shared mounts

Note also that in some distributions, root filesystem is not mounted as a shared mount, this will give an error like:

$ distrobox-enter
Error response from daemon: path /sys is mounted on /sys but it is not a shared or slave mount
Error: failed to start containers: ...

To resolve this, use this command:

mount --make-rshared /

To make it permanent, you can place it in /etc/rc.local.

List of distributions including distrobox in their repositories

New Host Distro support

If your distro of choice is not on the list, open an issue requesting support for it, we can work together to check if it is possible to add support for it.

Or just try using it anyway, if it works, open an issue and it will be added to the list!

Containers Distros

Distrobox guests tested successfully with the following container images:

Images marked with Toolbox are tailored images made by the community efforts in toolbx-images/images, so they are more indicated for desktop use, and first setup will take less time. Note however that if you use a non-toolbox preconfigured image, the first distrobox-enter you’ll perform can take a while as it will download and install the missing dependencies.

A small time tax to pay for the ability to use any type of image. This will not occur after the first time, subsequent enters will be much faster.

NixOS is not a supported container distro, and there are currently no plans to bring support to it. If you are looking for unprivileged NixOS environments, we suggest you look into nix-shell or nix portable

New Distro support

If your distro of choice is not on the list, open an issue requesting support for it, we can work together to check if it is possible to add support for it.

Or just try using it anyway, if it works, open an issue and it will be added to the list!

Older distributions

For older distributions like CentOS 5, CentOS 6, Debian 6, Ubuntu 12.04, compatibility is not assured.

Their libc version is incompatible with kernel releases after >=4.11. A work around this is to use the vsyscall=emulate flag in the bootloader of the host.

Keep also in mind that mirrors could be down for such old releases, so you will need to build a custom distrobox image to ensure basic dependencies are met.

GPU Acceleration support

For Intel and AMD Gpus, the support is baked in, as the containers will install their latest available mesa/dri drivers.

For NVidia, you can use the --nvidia flag during create, see distrobox-create documentation to discover how to use it.

Alternatively, you can use the nvidia-container-toolkit utility to set up the integration independently from the distrobox’s own flag.