Debian-11: Running containers on it

LXC
1

Friends

I am stuck on Debian-11 (I have Debian-12 available for development, but deployment is stuck)

I cannot find any useable documentation for running LXC on Debian-11.

I have been naively developing in an Incus container running Debian-11, but when I went to spin up a container on Debian-11 everything is different

I added: lxc libvirt0 libpam-cgfs bridge-utils uidmap lxc-templates lxcfs bridge-utils cgroup-tools

lxc is not a command. lxc-* for Africa, except nothing for accessing or listing images I can see

Nor network bridges.

I think I have polluted my priors by building containers on Debian-12 and now am all at sea. I am hoping there is, somewhere, old documentation for Debian-11 and LXC

I see Incus has been backported. Good.

But I have to convince the powers that be that the software I am using is safe and secure. Using the official Debian repositories is a good start.

2

Hi!

There’s

  1. Incus, where you run commands using the incus tool.
  2. LXC, where you run commands using the lxc-start, and other similar lxc-xxx tools.
  3. LXD (NOT SUPPORTED HERE), where you run commands with the disingenuous lxc command.

Indeed, Incus is available in the Debian 11 backports.

If you want to install LXC for now, then you need to follow the official documentation,

3

Rightio. To clarify.

lxc as a command to manage containers is part of LXD which is not available on Debian-11 and is a Canonical product, hence “NOT SUPPORTED HERE” I get it. Ok.

I am not going to be able to have both of: Use Debian-11. Install container manager from official repository

That is the situation?

Thank you for your fabulous work over the years and I am hoping that Incus is a glorious success, I do not see why it would not be.

I am hoping to persuade the people who issue orders to me that a backport of Incus is the way to go.

4

You’ll need to make a decision. When Debian 11 was released, there was no Incus yet. Therefore, Debian 11 cannot get retroactively Incus in the official bullseye packages (i.e. the repository).

You would either

  1. Upgrade to Debian 12 and use Incus from the official repositories
  2. Install Incus from backports on Debian 11
  3. Use the zabbly repository / stable on Debian 11
1 Like
5

As of currently Incus is only available in the backports on 12.

stable-bpo: 6.0.1-1~bpo12+1
testing: 6.0.1-3
unstable: 6.0.1-3

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/incus

6 
debian@mycontainer:~$ cat /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="11"
VERSION="11 (bullseye)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bullseye
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"
debian@mycontainer:~$ apt policy incus
incus:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 6.0.1-1~bpo12+1
  Version table:
     6.0.1-1~bpo12+1 100
        100 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports/main amd64 Packages
debian@mycontainer:~$

I may have the terminology wrong. Here is a container with Debian 11, I setup the backports from the next version (Debian 12), and I can see Incus in the package list.

edit:
I can see that the package cannot get installed due to unmet dependencies. Can someone explain what’s up here?

7

Interesting. We risk getting into the weeds of Debian configuration, but I have three Debian-12 machines, all set up slightly differently.

For the benefit of web searchers who find this:

  1. Vanila Debian-12 with no changes to sources.list after installation. As expected (thanks to the comments here) no Incus

  2. This configuration has Incus:

~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources 
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: mirror+file:///etc/apt/mirrors/debian.list
Suites: bookworm bookworm-updates bookworm-backports
Components: main

Types: deb deb-src
URIs: mirror+file:///etc/apt/mirrors/debian-security.list
Suites: bookworm-security
Components: main
  1. This one (leaking that I am in Aotearoa!) has Incus
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list|grep -v '^#'|grep .
deb http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb http://apt.llvm.org/bookworm/ llvm-toolchain-bookworm main
deb-src http://apt.llvm.org/bookworm/ llvm-toolchain-bookworm main
deb http://apt.llvm.org/bookworm/ llvm-toolchain-bookworm-16 main
deb-src http://apt.llvm.org/bookworm/ llvm-toolchain-bookworm-16 main
deb http://apt.llvm.org/bookworm/ llvm-toolchain-bookworm-17 main
deb-src http://apt.llvm.org/bookworm/ llvm-toolchain-bookworm-17 main

I am no expert on Debian configuration, and I am not really going to dig any further.

So long as I can get Incus from sources like these I have a small chance of steering the powers that be in this direction

EDIT: Feeling idiotic! Turns out in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zabbly-incus-stable.sources there is https://pkgs.zabbly.com/incus/stable