Toolbx - Linux Desktop Containers

Linux

Containers

Published

October 4, 2022

Modified

October 4, 2022

Unprivileged fully mutable container environment for everyday software development and debugging.

Front-end built on top of Podman and OCI standard container technologies.
Keeps the host system small and decoupled from development environments

From the Fedora documentation [^3]:

Each toolbox container is an environment that you can enter from the command line. Inside each one, you will find:

Your existing username and permissions
Access to your home directory and several other locations
Access to both system and session D-Bus, system journal and Kerberos
Common command lines tools, including a package manager

Toolbox customizes newly created containers in a certain way. This requires certain tools and paths to be present and have certain characteristics inside the OCI image. … Toolbox enables sudo(8) access inside containers

Fedora images for toolbox [^4] are available from the Fedora container registry [^5].

Start Containers

Create a toolbox container:

Downloads an OCI container image from a registry (if available)
By default an image matching the version of the host
If the host system does not have a matching image Fedora is used instead
OCI image called <ID>-toolbox:<VERSION-ID> (cf. /usr/lib/os-release)

toolbox create # using the defaults
toolbox enter
# quit the current container with `exit`

Use a specific version of Fedora:

toolbox --image fedora-toolbox:34 create
toolbox enter --release 34

Debian Container

Build a Debian/Ubuntu toolbox image with:

https://piware.de/gitweb/?p=bin.git;a=blob;f=build-debian-toolbox

wget -O ~/bin/build-debian-toolbox \
      'https://piware.de/gitweb/?p=bin.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-debian-toolbox' 
chmod +x ~/bin/build-debian-toolbox
# i.e. Ubuntu
build-debian-toolbox 20.10 ubuntu
toolbox enter 20.10