Conty

This is an easy to use non-root container compressed into squashfs and packed into a single executable that runs (or at least should run) on most Linux distros.

You can use it to run any applications, including games (Vulkan and OpenGL).

Besides, due to bubblewrap, Conty also supports true filesystem sandboxing, so you can even use it to sandbox your applications.

In other words, it's a portable Arch Linux distro packed into a single executable that can be used to run any applications. Conty combines benefits of flatpak and AppImage.

It uses two technologies:

• SquashFS (using squashfuse)
• Linux namespaces (using bubblewrap)

Benefits

• Single executable - download (or create) and run, nothing else it required.
• Root rights are not required.
• Compressed into squashfs, so it takes much less disk space than unpacked containers.
• Contains many libraries and packages so it can run almost everything. And you don't need to install anything on your main (host) system. You can even run 32-bit applications on pure 64-bit systems.
• Based on Arch Linux, so it contains latest software, including latest videodrivers.
• Almost completely seamless experience. All applcations that you run with Conty store their configs in your HOME directory as if you wouldn't use container at all.
• Supports filesystem sandboxing.

Requirements

The only requirements are bash, fuse2, tar and coreutils. And your /tmp directory should allow binaries execution (which it does by default on most distros).

Also, your Linux kernel must support unprivileged user namespaces. On some Linux distros this feature is disabled by default and can be enabled with sysfs:

sysctl kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1

or

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/unprivileged_userns_clone

Usage

Either download ready-to-use executable from the releases page or create your own (the instructions are below). Make it executable before run.

chmod +x conty.sh
./conty.sh command command_arguments

For example, if you want to run an application from your HOME or from somewhere on your storage run something like:

./conty.sh /full/path/to/a/binary

Conty also contains Steam, Lutris, PlayOnLinux, Wine-Staging-TkG and many more.

./conty.sh steam
./conty.sh lutris
./conty.sh playonlinux
./conty.sh wine app.exe

It has a builtin file manager (pcmanfm):

./conty.sh pcmanfm

Want to check if graphics acceleration works? Run glxinfo, glxgears, vulkaninfo and vkcube:

./conty.sh glxinfo | grep direct
./conty.sh glxgears
./conty.sh vulkaninfo
./conty.sh vkcube

You can even use Conty for compilation:

./conty.sh gcc src.c
./conty.sh git clone https://something.git
cd something && ./conty.sh ./configure
./conty.sh make

There are many more integrated programs. You can list all of them with:

./conty.sh ls /usr/bin

Let me know if you want something else to be included in the container.

There are some other features, see the internal help for more information.

./conty.sh --help

Sandbox

Conty uses bubblewrap and thus supports filesystem sandboxing. By default it's disabled and all directories on your system are available for the container.

You can enable sandboxing with the SANDBOX environment variable. You can allow access to directories and/or files you want with the BIND variable. And it's also possible to disable network with the DISABLE_NET. And you can set custom HOME directory with the HOME_DIR variable. For instance:

export DISABLE_NET=1
export SANDBOX=1
export BIND="/home/username/.steam /home/username/.local/share/Steam"
./conty.sh steam

Or

export DISABLE_NET=1
export SANDBOX=1
export HOME_DIR="/home/username/custom_home_dir"
./conty.sh steam

If you just want a sandboxing functionality but don't need a container with a full-size Linux ditro inside (which is what Conty mainly is), i recommend to take a look directly at these projects: bubblewrap and firejail. Sandboxing is a good additional feature of Conty, but is not its main purpose.

Known issues

Nvidia users will experience problems if their Nvidia kernel module version mismatches the version of the Nvidia libraries inside Conty.

For example, if the version of your Nvidia kernel module is 460.56 and the libraries inside the container are from 460.67 version, then graphics acceleration will not work.

There is an experimental solution for this problem in the latest Conty release that can be enabled with the NVIDIA_FIX variable. If you encounter this problem, please let me know if this feature does or doesn't fix it for you.

export NVIDIA_FIX=1
./conty.sh glxgears

How to create your own Conty executables

If you want to create Arch-based container, then use the create-arch-bootstrap.sh script. Root rights are required for this step, because chrooting is used here.

./create-arch-bootstrap.sh

You can edit the script if you want to include different set of packages inside the container.

If you want to use some other distro, then you need to manually obtain it from somewhere.

For the sake of convenience, there are compiled binaries of bwrap and squashfuse and their dependencies (utils.tar) uploaded in this repo, you can use them or you can use your own binaries. Use the create-utils.sh script to easily compile your own bwrap and squashfuse. Just make sure to set the correct size of the utils.tar in the squashfs-start.sh.

./create-utils.sh

When distro bootsrap and utils.tar are obtained, use the create-conty.sh script to pack everything into a single executable.

./create-conty.sh

Done!