On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 01/17/2014 03:27 PM, Jonathan Duncan wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 2:36 PM, S. Dale Morrey <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Have you looked at Docker?
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_%28software%29
>>>
>>>
>> I have been using, with great success, Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com).
>
> My understanding is that Vagrant is the preferred way of using Docker
> under the Mac and Linux.
>
> When you're running your virtual distro inside of an LXC container using
> Vagrant or Docker, can you have it run a full desktop environment on my
> native video hardware? Some of the examples I've found run everything
> over ssh. That's not what I'm aiming for.
>
> I'd like to be able to run, say Linux Mint in a container on top of
> Fedora, and then run a regular Cinnamon Desktop running in the Mint
> container but on my native screen (no ssh, no virtualized graphics
> card). Can Vagrant or Docker provide an easy way to do that? I believe
> LXC is capable of what I describe.
Unless Vagrant has got some new backend support recently, the role
that it plays for Mac is to set up a VirtualBox or VMware Linux VM to
run Docker on. Docker itself already has a configuration language to
set up custom images. And Docker is a really slick tool, but I don't
think it's what you're looking for. Although it does a full Linux
install, it doesn't actually run the full distro in most cases. The
disk image is mostly there for the libraries and such, and the real
point of Docker is to run sandboxed single processes (or a small group
of processes, like nginx+node+mongodb or something) without a lot of
overhead. Docker is like a chroot-on-steroids, not really a 'run a
full guest OS' thing.
The userspace tools that come with LXC, on the other hand, are set up
to run the init process of the installed image and give you a whole
sandboxed environment. They come with some scripts to install various
distros, but unless there's been a lot of work on them recently, they
don't work very well outside of Debian or Ubuntu images, or really
really old Fedora. There were some issues with systemd as the init
process of a container; I think the systemd guys worked through the
issues but I'm not sure if those have made it out to the systemd-based
distros yet.
Anyway, it sounds like the sharing of graphical resources with a
container is possible, and you can probably set it up with the lxc
configuration tools, but I don't think it's a well-supported use case
right now. It would be pretty cool, though, so definitely report back
if you're successful.
--Levi
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