LXD Terminal

LXD Terminal is a Developer Terminal that runs a system container on the desktop. This allows the terminal itself to be fully confined and the underlying system to be read-only. The system container itself can have anything you want installed in it, but they are all separated from the rest of the system (both ways, depends on who you trust).

Building

LXD Terminal is built with snapcraft. You can install that:

snap install --classic snapcraft

Then you can build LXD Terminal:

snapcraft

If you want to do so in your local system go with:

snapcraft --destructive-mode

How it works

Really at it's core, LXD Terminal is just GNOME Terminal with a bunch of wrapper scripts and minor customizations. All of the hard work has been done by the GNOME Terminal developers and the LXD Developers, this just provides a connection between the two.

First run

At first run the LXD Terminal creates a container that is connected into your desktop. It is a full container, and you've got sudo rights, but there is also several sockets that are bridged into the container.

• X11, there is a DISPLAY variable set and you can run X apps in the container
• Pulse Audio, the Pulse socket is bridged, so you can run audio apps in the container
• LXD, if you want to manage LXD that socket is also bridged

Also your home directory is available at ~/host so you can get files that are downloaded from a webbrowser or edit files as you need to. Note: this means that programs you install in the container can effect the files in your home directory, so still be careful with what you install!

Successive Runs

Now that the container is built the terminal just creates a login shell to the container and you can do what ever you want. When you close all of the terminal windows the container will be shutdown to save on resources.

Questions (and some answers)

How do I used LXD?

The LXD socket is mapped to /srv/lxd/unix.socket but the permissions are set to require root. So you should be able to use it with sudo lxc.