Running GUI Applications in LXD Containers

June 10th, 2018/Share/Edit on Github ✏️

In this post we are going to see how to use LXC (Linux Containers) to run GUI applications within a container. The example shows how to run Firefox with X11 and GPU-accelerated.

Getting Started

Clone the following github repo:

git clone https://github.com/sayems/lxc.resources.git

Launch GUI container in LXD

Navigate to lxc.resources directory and then run the following command:

$ ansible-playbook ubuntu.yml

Now, wait for LXD container to be ready. This might take a while to complete.

Login to `ubuntu` container

You can now login to the ubuntu container by running the following command:

$ lxc exec ubuntu -- sudo --user ubuntu --login

You can run glxgears to verify graphics hardware acceleration is working.

glxgears

Launch apps from LXD container

If you want to run Firefox from the container, run the following command:

$ lxc exec ubuntu -- sudo --login --user ubuntu firefox

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