Developer Luca di Maio has released version 1.3.0 of DistroBox, a tool to simplify running different versions of Linux in containers.

Distrobox is likely to be one of those tools that sounds either great or totally mystifying, depending on the sort of Linux user you are. If you routinely have to work with multiple different distros, you may be in the former group, and DistroBox could save you a fair amount of time and effort.

The tool is intended to simplify the creation and use of Linux system containers, making it easy to run one distro on top of another without the overhead of virtual machines. If you actively want virtual machines, or you're more used to them, you might know Vagrant.

In case you don't, Vagrant is a handy tool to automate away some of the tedious software configuration management (SCM) of working with VMs.

It's a wrapper around your choice of hypervisor and SCM tools (primarily Puppet and Chef).

With a single command, Vagrant will create a new VM, install the OS of your choice in it and configure it. Then with another command, you can make an SSH connection into the new VM.

Distrobox does something similar to this, but using containers. So it's smaller, simpler, and much lighter-weight, but by the definition of OS-level virtualization, it can only support running Linux environments on a Linux host.

Even if you don't work with this stuff, you're doubtless well aware that there are lots of Linux distros out there, and many of them are profoundly different from one another. If you develop or manage software that runs on Linux, you have to allow for these differences, which means a lot of testing and switching boxes and distros.

Distrobox is intended to simplify this and make some of the pain go away. It's a wrapper around two of the most common Linux container runtimes, Docker and Podman.

It offers commands to create, enter, leave, and remove Linux system containers: that is, a complete OS except the kernel, running inside a container on your existing kernel. So each container has its own init system and all the core files which make one distro different from another.

It wraps the container engine in a simple command line, with just six commands: create, enter, list, stop, rm, and version. So, for instance, if you're running Fedora, you could create an Ubuntu container and test apps just as if they were running on Ubuntu.

But it's more powerful than just that. If you're using an immutable distro such as the Silverblue version of Fedora, you can add a conventional distro in a container, and then inside that you can install and run apps as normal, and they will run directly on your kernel. Or on a non-glibc distro such as Alpine Linux, run an app that needs glibc, such as Google Chrome. Distrobox maps your home directory into its containers by default so all your normal files are available, and you can run graphical apps that use both X.org and Wayland.

Di Maio describes Version 1.3.0 as "a quite big release." This seems reasonable as it's a relatively new tool – version 1.0.0 only came out at the start of December.

The project's website has installation instructions. Older versions are already in some distros' repositories, or you can get the latest release from GitHub. ®

Comment Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.

Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.

Apple is extending support for its Rosetta 2 x86-64-to-Arm binary translator to Linux VMs running under the forthcoming macOS 13, codenamed Ventura.

The next version of macOS was announced at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference on Monday, and the new release has a number of changes that will be significant to Linux users. The company has disclosed the system requirements for the beta OS, which you can read on the preview page.

One level of Linux relevance is that macOS 13 still supports Intel-based Macs, but only recent ones, made in 2017 and later. So owners of older machines – including the author – will soon be cut off. Some will run Windows on them via Bootcamp, but others will, of course, turn to Linux.

A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.

Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.

This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.

Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

The Linux Mint XApps suite of cross-desktop accessories has a new member – the Timeshift backup tool.

The Linux Mint blog post for June revealed that Mint team lead Clement Lefevbre recently took over maintenance of the Timeshift backup tool used in Linux Mint.

Timeshift is akin to Windows System Restore in that it automatically keeps backups of system files. It's not Mint-specific and was originally developed by Tony George. That name might sound familiar as we recently mentioned his company TeeJeeTech as the creator of the original Unity-based remix, UMix.

Linux Lite has been around since 2012 and version 6, codenamed "Fluorite", is one of the first Ubuntu-based distros to offer a version built on Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish", released just last month.

This is unapologetically a distro aimed at Windows users. For instance, unlike some distros, there are no difficult questions of what desktop you want – you get Xfce 4.16, with a trendy flat theme, but a somewhat retro default layout that reminds us of Windows XP. The Start button and window buttons have text labels, for instance. We liked that: it's simple, efficient, and welcome, but Zorin OS 16 manages a more modern Windows look.

Linux Lite also isn't bashful about including non-open-source freeware: the default web browser is Google Chrome. The very long and rather rambling release announcement says this is because Ubuntu distributes Firefox as a Snap package and that the developers wanted to shield users from too many package managers. That's fair enough.

Right after the latest release of the KDE Frameworks comes the Plasma Desktop 5.25 plus the default desktop for the forthcoming Linux Mint 23.

In a sign of how display handling is evolving, the GNOME desktop's 3D-compositing Mutter window manager is gaining support for variable refresh rate (VRR, also known as Adaptive Sync) displays.

Mutter is an important chunk of code. As the project page says, it's "a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library."

It's the basis of GNOME Shell, which is implemented [PDF] as a Mutter plug-in, but other desktops use it as well.

Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.

Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.

The Intezer/BlackBerry team discovered Symbiote in November 2021, and said it appeared to have been written to target financial institutions in Latin America. Analysis of the Symbiote malware and its behavior suggest it may have been developed in Brazil. 

Fresh versions of three of the bigger open-source application suites just landed for those seeking to break free from proprietary office apps.

LibreOffice is the highest profile of them, and the project recently put out version 7.3.4, the latest release in the Community version of the suite.

The Document Foundation maintains two versions of LibreOffice; the other is the Enterprise branch.

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