Distrobox on Zorin

General Help
1

Yesterday, a user asked about installing Autodesk Maya, which has proven to be problematic on Ubuntu.
In the research process, I came across Distrobox, which I’d like to try out.

Could anything go wrong, or can you install and uninstall distrobox and podman or docker without any issues?

My idea is to install another Linux distribution, such as RHEL or Rocky Linux, in Zorin and then export a specific app from the guest container into Zorin.

Does the installation of a distribution in Distrobox require as much storage space as a real installation (as is the case with virtual machines, for example) or less? What is the approximate size in GiB I should expect?

So, is it safe to run such programs or can something break?

Which is the best gui tool for managing distrobox? I'd prefer a tool which is available as .deb or offers an executable file, but most of the GUI tools are flatpaks.

I'm interested which installation method needs the lowest disk space. Would it be enough to run Distrobox with Lilypod or are functions missing then?

2

distrobox is fine on zorin. its just podman/docker containers so uninstalling is clean, wont trash the host.

storage is way less than a vm. empty rocky/rhel box is usually like 1-3gb, grows when you install apps inside.

i just use the cli. BoxBuddy is the gui people mention most but yeah flatpak. DistroShelf is another.

lilipod works for basic boxes but podman is the safer default, fewer weird export/enter quirks.

low disk install path:
sudo apt install podman
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/89luca89/distrobox/main/install | sh

then something like
distrobox create -i rockylinux:9 -n rocky
and after you install the app inside, distrobox-export --app whatever

1 Like
3

Thank you for your reply. I tried it in a Zorin 18.1 Core live session and Rocky 9, and the installation of podman and distrobox worked, but most apps which I tried to install showed an Error: Unable to find a match, even when I ran sudo dnf check-update before.

The installation of the app cockpit worked, but it couldn't be exported because of no existing desktop file, and then I tried with foliate and terminator, but both showed unable to find a match.

Hm...I wanted to test to install and export just any app, it doesn't matter which one. Perhaps I first should try a well-known distro as LinuxMint. You have no desktop in distrobox, just the terminal, and the command gnome-software didn't work in Rocky container. There seem to be no graphical apps preinstalled.
I'm surprised at how little storage space it takes up. I didn't think I'd be able to try it out during the live session. I even upgraded Rocky, but it didn't help to find the apps.

Edit: I tried Fedora 44 now, this didn't work and showed, when entering the command "distrobox enter Fedora" at Ensuring user's access: Error: An error occured.

Then I tried with Debian 13, it showed problems with setting the German locale, but the export of an app (terminology) worked and the app was shown in Zorin's start menu then and could be launched via the Debian's distrobox container.
Interesting. I've never used something like this before.

I downloaded and installed the .zip package of BoxBuddy, and after running the installation script I was able to launch the program by clicking on the boxbuddy-rs file in the extracted BoxBuddy folder. It wasn't big.

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Edit: I noted that BoxBuddy 2.6.0 only showed older versions of available images. It seems not to be up to date. When I searched for supported guest images at distrobox, there were listed newer ones. I think the images are partially outdated, and some images there didn't work (they are not listed on the distrobox site).
I tried the installation of Rocky 9 this time with BoxBuddy, and it worked, also the installation and export of gedit was successful. But I'm still not sure if I would have to add repositories first to find more apps.