So I recently moved from Stable to Beta to capitalize on Distrobox being added natively to the deck. I used Distrobox a lot late last year, then after I upgraded to a new SSD, went entirely fresh and stayed in Stable channel.

The problem I’m encountering, I can create a container (created 2 Debian containers and a Fedora container), but I can’t enter any of them. I tried removing and creating new ones to no avail. This is the output I get below. Wondering if anyone has encountered this or if it’s just me, or if there are recommendations on how to troubleshoot.

deck@steamdeck ~)$ distrobox enter debian Container debian is not running. Starting container debian run this command to follow along:

podman logs -f debian

[conmon:e] Include journald in compilation path to log to systemd journal Error: unable to start container “0abddd5ce95420fcfa7b670862258704a724fb270c18176d6e3602a2d99018c6”: exit status 1

  • @RussianrangerOP
    1•1 year ago

    So I wanted to follow up on this with what I did, and think I found the solution. This way if someone like me trawls the internet looking for something that is the same problem, they might have resolution.

    Basically I isolated the problem to podman. What it looks like is I had an existing podman directory pre-3.5.1 update and it had issues with distrobox. So what I did;

    Went to .local\podman - deleted the contents of that folder.

    Then followed the emudeck distrobox guide to reinstall podman to .local\bin\

    Made sure to rename the podman launcher to simply “podman”.

    I also edited the .bashrc in home\deck which looks like it had leftovers from the previous podman to have the following (per guide)

    #Uncomment the xhost line below if you know that you are using xhost #xhost +si:localuser:$USER export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

    I only re-installed podman, and left distrobox alone. You may also have to use the following commands, as I did;

    sudo touch /etc/subuid /etc/subgid

    sudo usermod --add-subuid 100000-165535 --add-subgid 100000-165535 $USER

    For reference, this is the guide - https://emudeck.github.io/community-creations/steamos/third-party-emulation/?h=distrobox#how-to-set-up-distrobox

    Hope this helps some stranger out there figure things out