Examples: Be able to use CentOS / RHEL / other operating systems for podman machine init / start

[cdrage]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

When I run podman machine, maybe I'd like to try using RHEL or other operating systems. Instead, I'm stuck using fedora-coreos / running the default podman machine operating system.

Describe the solution you'd like

We should be able to provide instructions / alternatives to try out Podman Desktop against RHEL, RHED, etc.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[ashley-cui]

I'd do this with caution, because at the current moment the Podman team can only support FCOS (eventually maybe RHELCOS), and doing a demo on this may give of the impression that we can support other OS's.

[baude]

agree. of all the things required rn, are there not significantly more impactful and import things to do ?

[afbjorklund]

You can use the existing Lima provider, to run other operating systems - such as Fedora (Cloud)

The instance name is currently hardcoded ("podman-lima"), but you can use any template://

EDIT: In v1.0.1, the hardcoded instance name was changed from "podman-lima" to just "podman".

limactl start template://podman

EDIT: In v1.1.0, it is not hardcoded anymore - but available in preferences

---

If you choose another template (than podman), you have to install podman on the machine yourself

You can see how podman does it: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/master/examples/podman.yaml

And follow the upstream podman instructions: https://podman.io/docs/installation#installing-on-linux

limactl start --name podman template://centos-stream

[afbjorklund]

Lima

Using CentOS Stream instead of the default Fedora Cloud, causes the image download to be twice as big:

475M	https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/38/Cloud/x86_64/images/Fedora-Cloud-Base-38-1.6.x86_64.qcow2
1.1G	https://cloud.centos.org/centos/9-stream/x86_64/images/CentOS-Stream-GenericCloud-9-20230523.0.x86_64.qcow2

I'm not sure why this is, but it is still smaller than CoreOS (the download is 627M, but decompresses to 1.6G!)

646M	.local/share/containers/podman/machine/qemu/fedora-coreos-38.20230806.2.0-qemu.x86_64.qcow2.xz
1,6G	.local/share/containers/podman/machine/qemu/podman-machine-default_fedora-coreos-38.20230918.2.0-qemu.x86_64.qcow2

No public templates available for RHEL

But these distributions are available:

• AlmaLinux template://almalinux

• Rocky Linux template://rocky

---

There is also Alpine.

There is an Alpine image available as an alternative, it weighs in at 98M - but it doesn't do rootless (no systemd)

https://github.com/afbjorklund/lima/blob/nerdcore/examples/alpine-podman.yaml (currently slightly out of date)

It is just the template://alpine, with the latest podman pre-installed from the latest distro package available:

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=podman&branch=edge&repo=community (apk add podman)

EDIT: Here are some ready-to-run examples, using the regular ISO:

https://github.com/afbjorklund/lima/tree/alpine-examples/examples

[afbjorklund]

More examples, for Ubuntu and AlmaLinux: (you can probably make your own "remix")

https://github.com/afbjorklund/lima/tree/podman-desktop/examples/podman-desktop

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had activity in the last 6 months. It will be closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs. Please feel free to leave a comment if you believe the issue is still relevant. Thank you for your contributions!

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had activity in the last 6 months. It will be closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs. Please feel free to leave a comment if you believe the issue is still relevant. Thank you for your contributions!

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically closed because it has not had any further activity in the last 30 days. Thank you for your contributions!