Incus/LXD: What is the path forward for users of other distros?

Incus
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I guess I’m pretty out of the loop, but I just discovered that the archlinux images have been removed from the default lxd image server. Aside from switching distros, what are my options? Host my own images? What’s the easiest way to get started with that? Is there another image server I can use? I’m guessing I will migrate to Incus now that I’m aware of it. Thanks to all that have contributed to these projects.

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Your path forward is indeed to switch over to Incus, which you can do while keeping all your existing instances and configuration: Migrating from LXD - Incus documentation

As mentioned in Important notice for LXD users (image server), this phase out is done progressively in order to only affect users who have a migration path.

As of yesterday and until Jan 15th, those affects are users of LXD 5.20 on any of the distributions for which we have official installation instructions: How to install Incus - Incus documentation

Rather than immediately cut off access entirely, we decided to only block the less common images for the first two weeks but starting Jan 15th, all images will become available to those users. Switching over to Incus then restores full access.

It’s unclear at this point whether Canonical intends to do anything to provide equivalent images to LXD users moving forward, they may do that or they may decide that they only really care about running Ubuntu. Either way, it’s not something we have any control over.

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Excellent! I was originally confused by your other post, but now it makes more sense to me. So it sounds like all I need to do is switch to Incus, which I am happy to do. Seems like a nice way to get people to switch and consolidate around the new project. Thank you for your extremely fast reply, and again for all your work!

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This worked for me, and I was able to launch a new archlinux image, but I thought I’d point out that there are still a few issues with the new incus package in the Arch extra repository (as detailed in the bug reports):

  • Both the lxd and incus package contain the fuidshift binary, so they are marked as conflicting, but lxd-to-incus needs lxd installed and running.
  • The incus service in the package contains a typo (incusd-admin instead of incus-admin as group)

To get things working, I had to:

  • grab the package source with pkgctl
  • remove the fuidshift install from the PKGBUILD
  • fix the service typo
  • build and install the package
  • start the incus service and run lxd-to-incus
  • uninstall lxd and stop incus
  • rebuild and install the incus package including the fuidshift binary this time

Additionally I needed a default storage pool as outlined here.

Things seem to be working though! (At least after a few minutes :smile:)

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That, hmm, doesn’t sound ideal :wink:

@Foxboron can you sort out those issues?
For fuidshift I’d either not include it at all (less and less relevant these days as a tool) or maybe put it into a incus-tools package or the like?

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That one is a bit odd. Did your existing LXD install have a working default profile with a storage pool attached to it?

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Hmm, I don’t remember for sure, and I’ve now uninstalled LXD, but if it seems odd to you my guess is that it didn’t have a storage pool attached. I think I might remember doing all that manually. I just mentioned it because the other thread was an incus migration as well.

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Chiming in from the sidelines… IIRC Arch also installs fuidshift into /usr/bin - so incus can just install it into /usr/sbin to avoid conflicts. The sbin is also “intended place for it”, so great for future efforts.

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/usr/sbin is symlinked towards /usr/bin on any modern distro. So this doesn’t actually work as a solution.

We can probably do a split-package, yes.

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/usr/sbin is symlinked towards /usr/bin on any modern distro. So this doesn’t actually work as a solution.

Wow, that’s a good point. I see our profiles, at least systemd, are pushing for that too.

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A brief update from Canonical can be found here: An update on the licence change and community image server - News - Ubuntu Community Hub

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I discovered distrobuilder is easy to install and relatively simple to get it to build images…

Nothing to stop you doing the same…

One very helpful tip was that if you check the Incus Jenkins logs you can see the arguments to distrobuilder that are used to create the existing images…

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