Examples: Be able to use CentOS / RHEL / other operating systems for `podman machine init / start`

[cdrage]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

When I run podman machine, maybe I'd like to try using RHEL or other operating systems. Instead, I'm stuck using fedora-coreos / running the default podman machine operating system.

Describe the solution you'd like

We should be able to provide instructions / alternatives to try out Podman Desktop against RHEL, RHED, etc.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[ashley-cui]

I'd do this with caution, because at the current moment the Podman team can only support FCOS (eventually maybe RHELCOS), and doing a demo on this may give of the impression that we can support other OS's.

[baude]

agree. of all the things required rn, are there not significantly more impactful and import things to do ?

[afbjorklund]

You can use the existing Lima provider, to run other operating systems - such as Fedora (Cloud)

The instance name is currently hardcoded ("podman-lima"), but you can use any template://

EDIT: In v1.0.1, the hardcoded instance name was changed from "podman-lima" to just "podman".

limactl start template://podman

EDIT: In v1.1.0, it is not hardcoded anymore - but available in preferences

---

If you choose another template (than podman), you have to install podman on the machine yourself

You can see how podman does it: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/master/examples/podman.yaml

And follow the upstream podman instructions: https://podman.io/docs/installation#installing-on-linux

limactl start --name podman template://centos-stream

[afbjorklund]

Lima

Using CentOS Stream instead of the default Fedora Cloud, causes the image download to be twice as big:

475M    https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/38/Cloud/x86_64/images/Fedora-Cloud-Base-38-1.6.x86_64.qcow2
1.1G    https://cloud.centos.org/centos/9-stream/x86_64/images/CentOS-Stream-GenericCloud-9-20230523.0.x86_64.qcow2

I'm not sure why this is, but it is still smaller than CoreOS (the download is 627M, but decompresses to 1.6G!)

646M    .local/share/containers/podman/machine/qemu/fedora-coreos-38.20230806.2.0-qemu.x86_64.qcow2.xz
1,6G    .local/share/containers/podman/machine/qemu/podman-machine-default_fedora-coreos-38.20230918.2.0-qemu.x86_64.qcow2

No public templates available for RHEL

But these distributions are available:

• AlmaLinux template://almalinux

• Rocky Linux template://rocky

---

There is also Alpine.

There is an Alpine image available as an alternative, it weighs in at 98M - but it doesn't do rootless (no systemd) https://github.com/afbjorklund/lima/blob/nerdcore/examples/alpine-podman.yaml (currently slightly out of date) It is just the `template://alpine`, with the latest `podman` pre-installed from the latest distro package available: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=podman&branch=edge&repo=community (`apk add podman`) EDIT: Here are some ready-to-run examples, using the regular ISO: https://github.com/afbjorklund/lima/tree/alpine-examples/examples

[afbjorklund]

Added template for Fedora CoreOS to Lima, adding ignition support to the cloud-init support:

• https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/pull/1653

limactl start --name podman template://fedora-coreos

limactl start --name docker template://fedora-coreos

It doesn't have the portForward by default, so that YAML needs to be added to the configuration.

But all of podman and docker and nerdctl are already installed, by the default installation here.

portForwards:
- guestSocket: "/run/user/{{.UID}}/podman/podman.sock"
  hostSocket: "{{.Dir}}/sock/podman.sock"

[afbjorklund]

More examples, for Ubuntu and AlmaLinux: (you can probably make your own "remix")

https://github.com/afbjorklund/lima/tree/podman-desktop/examples/podman-desktop

[github-actions[bot]]

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