Isobox "containers" are referred to as "isoboxes" or an "isobox" Isobox as a program is referred to as Isobox with a capital I (except in commands).
In order to create an isobox you first need a distro's iso, for this example we will use
the iso you can find at https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-linux/files/Final/Xfce/MX-21.3_x64.iso/download
Once you have your iso, you'll have to create an isobox for it.
The command is the following:
isobox create name path-to-iso
name and path-to-iso being positional arguments.
This will find the squashfs in the iso, and unsquash it into /var/lib/isobox/mounts/name or the mountpoint
specified with the -mountpoint argument.
Congratulations! You made your first isobox. Next up you can do several things.
Firstly gain a root shell into that isobox with the command:
isobox shell name
Secondly, you can try to make Isobox attempt to startx inside the isobox
potentially launching the live iso's gui, it doesnt work all the time, but it can do the trick.:
isobox gui name
You may want to set the -tty argument to launch the gui in another tty.
Or the -display argument to set the display to startx on (:0, :1, :2, etc).
You now know the basics of Isobox! There are more commands like isobox ls
that you can discover and that arent covered here, but you can now use Isobox like a pro!
For more info run isobox -h
or isobox command -h
, command can be ls, gui, shell, move, etc.
Here is a list of all commands with a rough description of what they do.
Outside an isobox:.
isobox create
Create an isobox from an iso file.
isobox shell
Enter an isobox.
isobox ls
List all isoboxes.
isobox remove
Remove an isobox.
isobox info
Get info about an isobox.
isobox gui
Enter an isobox and attempt to run startx
along with utilities like a sound server.
isobox purge
Delete all data related to isobox, generally to run before uninstalling manually or with pip.
Inside an isobox:.
/usr/local/bin/isobox_desktop_init.sh
Run utilities like pulseaudio/pipewire that are useful when using a desktop, automatically ran by isobox gui
.