Alpine

A while back Jessie Frazelle wrote a neat blog post on running desktop applications using Docker containers. It ends up that it isn’t too hard to run X clients in containers using podman or Docker .

Now that I have Alpine Linux running on my laptop I need to get rootless podman setup so I can run applications that aren’t included in the Alpine distribution. Podman is a Docker compatible container engine that doesn’t require a daemon, and can run as a user without any need for root access. That also means that there is a good chance this will all work on other distributions, not just on Alpine.

The Ansible playbooks for this article can be found here

I have a laptop that I use for experimenting with different operating systems. I’ve used it to run various Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I tend to set it up by hand, use it for a while, then reinstall with something new. In the most recent iteration of this I’ve used Alpine Linux to see if it would be suitable distribution for more than a container runtime. Many people may be familiar with Alpine from using Docker, where Alpine gives you one of the smallest footprint containers to start from. Some of its more compelling features are that it uses OpenRC as its init system, musl libc instead of glibc, and busybox for a pile of standard tools that normally require other binaries.