Container console questions

Incus
1

I’ve been using incus for a while now, but there are a couple of details I can’t seem to fully clear up. I’ve spent a decent amount to time searching here and the incus docs, but have not found the answer.

Let me us Alpine for example here, though this applies to others too. I should note I’m working with the incus-ui here and its all locally installed on my machine. I can get the container running, no problem. However, when I goto the console tab it asks for a login. I can’t seem to figure out what that would be. I have found that if I do a incus shell from the console I can get a root shell and proceed to do the work I need to. I’m not sure if I was missing something or if this is the way its supposed to work.

Also accessing the terminal, not console from the incus-ui seems to be different then the console. It seems to be dependent on the image I load as it seems there is software required to be installed in the container for it work. For example the ubuntu images have whatever it is already there and I can easily get a root shell to do what I need. Info about that seems a little sparse so if someone could explain that in more detail that would be useful. If anyone can help me make more sense of this I’d greatly appreciate it.

2

The text console isn’t very useful for containers, other than maybe seeing boot messages.
To login through it, you’d need to first create a user and set a password through the root shell.

The terminal runs /bin/bash which most distributions do have installed, Alpine is one which does not, so you need to manually override the terminal to use /bin/sh instead.

3

Thank you for clearing that up. I had a suspicion that something like that might be the case. Yeah I confirmed terminal requires bash as you said. Now I know.