If you're sort of confused as to what advantage there is to this way of doing things over just running a VM in VirtualBox or using Vagrant, you probably aren't yet aware of what the Docker project is doing.<p>It's creating the VirtualBox of Linux Containers. Docker image files are extremely light weight when compared to VirtualBox images and use Union File systems to allow for complete isolation rather than using VM volumes.<p>An example scenario for when you'd want something like this is if you want to load an experimental library for a specific application that some part of your system depends on the stability of. Fire up a docker image for just that application with the experimental library replacing the stable library and <i>just</i> the applications inside the docker image will see it. No need to even play around with library versions or links. And since the Docker images are so light weight and incur extremely little performance penalty (I think it is limited to just the cost of using the Union FS over your normal FS), you can do this for dozens of scenarios at once.
> root@host:~# curl <a href="http://get.docker.io" rel="nofollow">http://get.docker.io</a> | sh<p>No no no. Do NOT do this. Kids these days...
IMHO here's an even cooler hack-<p>Gtk+, the widget toolkit used to develop GNOME and many free software applications, supports rendering applications via HTML5. One of the developers has demonstrated using it to run desktop applications on OpenShift, Red Hat's PaaS, that you then access via your web browser.<p><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/03/19/broadway-on-openshift/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/03/19/broadway-on-openshif...</a><p><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/04/03/more-gtk-in-the-cloud/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/04/03/more-gtk-in-the-clou...</a>
This could be made VERY interesting if you also add an NX server in the mix. I find basic X11 connections via ssh to be rather laggy and unpleasant to use when the internet connection is not top.<p>The idea behind NX is to "fake" an X client on the server side and fake a NX server on the client side. This reduces the number of roundtrips required for each action. The improved responsiveness is dramatic -- even on a low speed and high-latency link, using the remote desktop feels like a local machine...<p><pre><code> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology
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Unfortunately, the two open source projects which aimed to reproduce the NX functionality seem to have been abandoned.<p><pre><code> http://freenx.berlios.de/
http://code.google.com/p/neatx/source/list
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Is anyone using NX these days? Perhaps, people stopped developing these because they work well already?
I can see usig this to get perfectly replicable, easy to upgrade/rollback and movable works environment - for both local and remote use.
I.e., use locally on powerfull machine or rdp to closest powerful machine you can access from slow device. Or have several workspaces similar to virtual desktops for multiple projects...
I got excited when I saw the Windows installation instructions link, but that is just how to setup Vagrant with VirtualBox to host a Linux machine.<p>Is there any open-source equivalent to things like Citrix's XenApp, VMWare's ThinApp, Microsoft's App-V, or independent tools like Sandboxie? <a href="http://alternativeto.net/software/sandboxie/" rel="nofollow">http://alternativeto.net/software/sandboxie/</a>
So, if I understood that correctly, it's just a virtual box image of ubuntu or debian that you run headlessly in a linux container (via docker) and then run a Xserver on your actual machine OS and connect to it via SSH with Xforward?<p>how is this any better than simply running virtualbox on your OS to begin with?
Here's a recipe for using vnc to get pixels out of a docker:<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run-gui-apps-in-a-docker" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run-gui-...</a>