[Lxc-users] Unable to create lxc CT on fedora 19

Tue Jul 9 14:51:50 UTC 2013

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael H. Warfield [mailto:mhw at WittsEnd.com]
> Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 7:45 PM
> To: Thomas Moschny
> Cc: mhw at WittsEnd.com; Lxc-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Lxc-users] Unable to create lxc CT on fedora 19
> 
> It's because of the catch-22 trying to bootstrap on a foreign distro,
> and this is where most of the other templates fall flat on their faces
> (and Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu does as well, just not as badly).  You
> have to download a minimal file system assuming you only have distro
> independent tools.  Once that's built, you can use the distro dependent
> tools (yum, apt, dpkg, zypper) in the chrooted container.  But you can't
> use them till you have it set up and don't have them before.  That makes
> for a challenge, for sure!  In some cases, it make take a little help
> from the distro vendors there.
> 
> I've just figure out some of what I need to do to get the SuSE template
> working on non-SuSE hosts.  Seems that rpm is present on SuSE and I
> should be able to eliminate zypper and use purely rpm to install the
> minimal (I'm finding this how the hard way working on some SuSE zLinux
> s360 stuff).
> 
> Debian and Fedora (and Redhat based et all) have debboot and febboot to
> assist in cross building this, but that's not universal.  The template
> owners (and I'm just a contributor) really need to try and make their
> templates work in a more distro independent manner.  But, that's why you
> will see these sorts of download peculiarities in some of the templates.
> We're working around running on a distro different than what we're
> installing.

With regard to the subject, I managed to install and run some different distro containers on a Debian host - with lxc-0.9.0 - and the prerequisites were a matter of installing & configuring the distro specific package managers on the host:
- Arch container on Debian host using the lxc-archlinux template:
	- pacman - installed from source - [1]
		- some configurations are needed for it to run on the host
	- arch install scripts - installed from repo - [2]
- Alpine container on Debian host using the lxc-alpine template:
	- apk-tools - installed from repo - [3]
		- this doesn't need to work on the host

I remember having a hard time installing a Fedora container on Fedora 17 because febootstrap was removed / converted to supermin and I didn't really find any documentation on how to get that going. Maybe I was searching in the wrong places or for the wrong stuff, but I ended up using a bare chroot for isolation. It would be really nice if the Fedora template would be up-to-date.

On a side note, I had a pretty easy time installing a Gentoo container using the script at [4], on the same Debian host. This is not completely managed by lxc-tools, but still uses lxc-start. Maybe there can be a discussion between the maintainers to merge this template in the lxc.sourceforge repo? ...

Best regards,
Bogdan P.

[1] ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/other/pacman/pacman-4.1.1.tar.gz
[2] https://github.com/falconindy/arch-install-scripts.git
[3] http://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/apk-tools
[4] https://github.com/globalcitizen/lxc-gentoo

> 
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> Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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