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Suggestion: add a parameter to specify the Linux distro

Open cmoulliard opened this issue 4 years ago • 7 comments

Suggestion

Add a parameter to specify the Linux distro (Centos, Fedora, Debian, ...) to be used as the default used is ubuntu and it seems that we cannot change it

cmoulliard avatar Oct 19 '21 10:10 cmoulliard

Currently the installation of docker is done via package manager and run via systemd. If we refactor, we must provide a distro-unspecific way of installing and starting the runtime.

The simplest way for docker is downloading the binaries and running dockerd in background when booting (https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/binaries/)

hown3d avatar Oct 19 '21 13:10 hown3d

Currently the installation of docker

Sorry but this not the purpose of my question. Wrong copy/paste maybe ?

cmoulliard avatar Oct 19 '21 13:10 cmoulliard

Ah copied out the first part 🙄

I wanted to state, that currently the only supported OS is ubuntu/debian because colima installs runtimes via APT package manager. That's why there's currently no way to specify a distro.

hown3d avatar Oct 19 '21 14:10 hown3d

Colima is meant to be a higher level use of Lima for container runtimes. i.e. provide sane defaults for most users. If you want total flexibility, you may need to go directly with Lima.

The plan is to use a more lightweight distro like Alpine but I do not have the luxury of time at the moment and thereby chose a distro that works.

Is this solely for the flexibility of choosing distros or there is a better suited distro than Ubuntu?

abiosoft avatar Oct 19 '21 17:10 abiosoft

Is this solely for the flexibility of choosing distros or there is a better suited distro than Ubuntu?

Most of the automation scripts we have developed in my team (bash, ansible playbooks, ...) have been designed to work mainly on Centos/RHEL/Fedora linux machines. This is why I'm looking about a tool like colima which can for macos developers setup easily a VM, docker and/or podman part of the VM to simplify their life when they test a k8s or container project.

cmoulliard avatar Oct 20 '21 09:10 cmoulliard

FYI alpine works pretty well and even gives you amd64 docker on M1: https://github.com/levsha/docker-on-lima

levsha avatar Oct 20 '21 14:10 levsha

My 5 cents here, even if the issue is old (but still open). I don't think we should think about the distribution, the goal of the project is tu provide a "containerd" environment. Normally the base Linux distribution should never be seen by the "final user". I think we could consider to change it to anything better if we can have top performances compared to the one already provided... but being focus on the goal of the product (like @abiosoft was saying in a previous comment).

mmornati avatar Nov 24 '21 20:11 mmornati