Container instead of VM: Why do all the sudo? [was Re: Software updater no longer functional]

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 28 Jan 2017 16:12:56 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>/tmp

Add a new user and do your experiments as the new user, without root
privileges, so no virtual machine is required.

It's true that experiments could at least damage your user's home, even
if you are doing them in /tmp, but if you add a second user for
experiments and you log in as this second user, this user has got no
access to the first user's home.

Another option is to install a second Ubuntu parallel to your first
Ubuntu and to run the new installed Ubuntu in a container, when booted
to your first Ubuntu. Then you only could destroy the Ubuntu in the
container, nothing outside of the container.

Dual booting two different Ubuntu installs is easy to do. Once two
Ubuntus are installed, install the package "systemd-container".

After that it only requires to mount the root directory and to run
systemd-nspawn.

I'm booted to Arch Linux and can run a real Ubuntu install in a container.
No virtualisation, no performance issues!

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ grep PRETTY /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Arch Linux"
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ sudo mkdir /mnt/moonstudio
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ sudo mount -wL moonstudio /mnt/moonstudio/ 
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ sudo systemd-nspawn -bqD /mnt/moonstudio/
systemd 229 running in system mode. (+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA +APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ -LZ4 +SECCOMP +BLKID +ELFUTILS +KMOD -IDN)
Detected virtualization systemd-nspawn.
Detected architecture x86-64.

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS!
[snip]
[weremouse at moonstudio ~]$ grep PRETTY /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS"

Regards,
Ralf