Convert user-installed apps into containers

The utility GUI Easy Containers is in the Filesystem menu. It is for creation and management of containers. One thing that it does is allow any app on the main desktop to be converted to a container.

However, the mechanism is only for inbuilt apps, that is, those in 'easy.sfs'. There have been a couple of requests in the forum to free this up. Now, Easy Containers allows choice of user-installed apps to be converted to run in a container.

If you used the PETget package manager, which is the traditional package manager, known to Puppy Linux users as the "PPM", you can install apps from whatever package repositories the PPM accesses. In the case of Easy Buster, that will be the Debian DEB repositories, plus some PET packages in the 'pet-noarch' and 'pet-buster' repositories.

These packages installed via the PPM are only installed on the main desktop. Though do note, the PPM works inside the "buster" and "pyro" containers (complete desktop in a container). If you installed an app to the main desktop, either via the PPM or you compiled it yourself from source, or whatever, if you would prefer to run the app in a container, Easy Containers will now do so, as long as it has a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications.

If you installed a big app via the PPM, after having converted it to run in a container, you could then uninstall it and its dependencies from the main desktop.

The modified script is /usr/local/easy_containers/easy-containers, and a fix was also required for /usr/local/easy_containers/ec-chroot. 

One usage detail. The .desktop file will have a line in it that looks like this:

Exec=solvespace

Where "solvespace" is an example, the app to be executed. The Exec line must not have any prefixed path, if it does it will be rejected. 

Tags: easy