• Distrobox

Create a dedicated distrobox container

Distrobox wants to be as generic as possible in supporting OCI images, but sometimes there could be some problems:

• The image you want to use is too old and the package manager mirrors are down
• The image you want to use has not a supported package manager or no package manager at all

Requirements

The only required programs that must be available in the container so that distrobox-init won’t start the installation are:

• the $SHELL you use (bash, zsh, fish etc etc)
• bash-completion
• bc
• bzip2
• curl
• diffutils
• findutils
• gnupg2
• hostname
• iproute
• iputils
• keyutils
• krb5-libs
• less
• lsof
• man-db
• man-pages
• ncurses
• nss-mdns
• openssh-clients
• pam
• passwd
• pigz
• pinentry
• ping
• procps-ng
• rsync
• shadow-utils
• sudo
• tcpdump
• time
• traceroute
• tree
• tzdata
• unzip
• util-linux
• vte-profile
• wget
• which
• whois
• words
• xorg-x11-xauth
• xz
• zip

And optionally:

• mesa-dri-drivers
• mesa-vulkan-drivers
• vulkan

If all those dependencies are met, then the distrobox-init will simply skip the installation process and work as expected.

To test if all packages requirements are met just run this in the container:

dependencies="
    bc
    bzip2
    chpasswd
    curl
    diff
    find
    findmnt
    gpg
    hostname
    less
    lsof
    man
    mount
    passwd
    pigz
    pinentry
    ping
    ps
    rsync
    script
    ssh
    sudo
    time
    tree
    umount
    unzip
    useradd
    wc
    wget
    xauth
    zip
"
for dep in ${dependencies}; do
    ! command -v "${dep}" && echo "missing $dep"
done