On 08/02/2017 11:13 AM, John Hodrien wrote:
On Wed, 2 Aug 2017, Mark Haney wrote:
Sure there is such a thing. It's a tiled console package (tilix is what I use). In all honesty, I wouldn't want Libreoffice running in a container and I can't imagine why you'd want an xterm in its own container. Most containers I've built have been RESTful API containers, NGINX proxies/web servers, etc. I spend more time on the container host making changes, than in the containers themselves. If an API change has been made, I throw a new container up with that change and test, rarely, if ever, do I need access the container directly. And that's the idea behind containers if you ask me.
Lots of people think of containers being for servers, as you say. It's what Docker lives off, and really does feel like the focus of Docker.
Singularity lets you think somewhat differently, and has proved very useful in areas like HPC, where you want to let a user bring a software environment to a machine. You get people like OpenFOAM releasing their software as a Docker container:
https://openfoam.org/download/4-1-linux/
I've also used it to run Ubuntu packaged software on CentOS without having to jump through hoops trying to repackage it or otherwise rebuild a million dependencies in just the right way.
I honestly had forgotten about Singularity. Mainly because it's been a couple of years since I managed any HPC equipment. But seriously, I think of containers the same way I do linux tools. Unlike MS, a linux does does one thing, and that thing very well, whereas MS has tried to be everything to everyone and is so-so at all of them. Perhaps that was the original intention of container and it's morphed into something else over time, which, if true, means I need to adjust how I define it rather than trying to beat that square peg into the round hole in my head.
On a side note, as I write this, Pandora decided to toss 'Misunderstading' by Phil Collins into my playlist. It's playing as I type. Go figure.