I'm trying to get my mind round the various ways of wrapping/isolating collections of code and programs in Debian (well in any Linux I suppose) and I'm really not understanding them very well. When you go to the home of any particular one it seems to think you know what it is already and thus goes from there to tell you how to install it but doesn't really explain what it does.
So is there anything anywhere that gives a higher level view. The sorts of things I'm interested in are OCI, containers, Podman, Docker etc. The 'Container Tools Guide' at https://github.com/containers/buildah/tree/main/docs/containertools just takes me round in circles as it rather assumes I know what they mean by a container. I'm also particularly confused by Docker which seems simply to be something sitting in a virtual machine in which case why not just run the virtual machine and use that? Or is the Docker described at docker.com not what is meant by docking on Linux? I do understand (a bit) virtual machines like VirtualBox etc. I ran WIndows XP in VirtualBox for a while to support some Epson Scanner software in particular. I'm particularly interested in a way to run (say) Debian Bullseye within my Debian Bookworm system. I'm looking for something slightly 'lighter weight' than a full-blown virtual machine like virtualbox though I guess I can use virtualbox if I have to. There are also, of course, things like Appimage and snap but although they might be able to do what I'm after they're not quite what I want and do seem very complex to build. From where I am, running virtualbox will be (much) simpler. -- Chris Green ยท
