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.

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.