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Create a dedicated distrobox container

Distrobox wants to be as generic as possible in supporting OCI images, but sometimes there could be some problems:

• The image you want to use is too old and the package manager mirrors are down
• The image you want to use has not a supported package manager or no package manager at all

Requirements

The only required programs that must be available in the container so that distrobox-init won’t start the installation are:

• the $SHELL you use (bash, zsh, fish etc etc)
• bc
• curl
• diffutils
• findutils
• less
• ncurses
• passwd
• pinentry
• procps-ng
• shadow-utils
• sudo
• util-linux (that provides the mount command)
• vte-profile
• wget

If all those dependencies are met, then the distrobox-init will simply skip the installation process and work as expected.

To test if all packages requirements are met just run this in the container:

if ! command -v find || ! command -v mount || ! command -v passwd ||
    ! command -v sudo || ! command -v useradd || ! command -v diff ||
    ! command -v pinentry || ! command -v wget || ! command -v curl ||
    ! command -v less || ! command -v bc ||
    ! command -v "${SHELL}"; then

 echo "Missing dependencies"

fi