Distrobox no longer working

Aurora
1

Today after reboot distrobox was no longer working. Took me some hours to understand what went wrong.

First I could enter a distrobox only once, next time when I wanted to enter I got a message that user manfred was not found in distrobox.

For whatever reason podman now wants to use ~/.config/containers instead of ~/.local/share/containers

I tested things by rebuilding a distrobox and it didn’t work ok because the stuff in ~/.config/containers wasn’t labelled correctly (from an SELinux perspective).

Does anybody have an idea where the new location might be setup?

2

I should add that podman info show all locations somewhere in ~/.config/containers

and distroshelf doesn’t see my (on commandline) created distrobox

3

I created a second user and when logging into that user podman info shows the correct paths, i.e. pointing to ~/.local/share/containers.

So something happened (presumably) in my home dir…

4

Found it. I had dealed with my shell config and set XDG_DATA_HOME to $HOME/.config.

This caused podman to look at ~/.config/containers instead of ~/.local/share/containers and caused podman info to show its information accordingly. So I deleted XDG_DATA_HOME and all is working again.

3 Likes
5

Good find! Thanks for sharing.

For future readers …

The XDG env vars are not really named well and can be confusing to use correctly. They are documented at Environment variables. They also document the intended default values which can help.

FWIW, I have learned over the years to make minimal changes to these even though my preference is to be explicit. When moving between distros the env var settings remain more portable - e.g., between Fedora variants on my laptop and Raspberry OS (debian based).

6

This was my exactly conclusion thereafter…:laughing:

1 Like
7

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