Bedrock Linux 0.7.3
A project that encourages users to mix apps from completely different distros? Mayank Sharma is aghast at the thought.
He wouldn’t even mix libraries from different repos, so Mayank Sharma is in a tizzy with a project that encourages users to mix apps from different distros!
We’ve been running distros inside others for quite a while now, first with virtualisation and these days with containers. Bedrock Linux, however, negates not only the physical overheads associated with virtualisation, but also the isolation of containers. While the seven-yearold distro hasn’t really just burst onto the scene, the project – headed by a sole developer – is still in the nascent stages of development. What Bedrock promises isn’t unique, but how it goes about delivering on that promise certainly is.
With it you can seamlessly enable different components from various distros to interact with each other. For instance, you can use Libreoffice from Ubuntu to browse files inside a Fedora installation, or even the latest graphics drivers from Arch to power graphical apps in Centos. There are both positives and negatives to this approach, but let’s first look at how it all adds up.
Bedrock Linux doesn’t follow the standard Linux distro installation process; the project is actually a script that takes over an existing installation. While you can allow it to hijack an existing installation, the developer recommends that you use it on a fresh installation, which is what he does himself in order to better reproduce (and resolve) any errors.
Once you’ve executed the script, you reboot into the new Bedrock-ed installation. You then have to use the brl command to fetch stratums, which are Bedrock’s way of referring to distro installs. A freshly hijacked Bedrock installation has two stratums (surely ‘strata’? –
Ed): one for Bedrock Linux and the other for the default installation on which you ran the script. You can then use brl to fetch other stratums such as Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu and so on.
Digging in the dirt
Once the stratum has been installed, you can use it to install apps and libraries. All executables in Bedrock belong to one of the installed stratums. So, for instance, if you’ve installed an Arch stratum on top of Ubuntu, you can use pacman from inside Ubuntu just as you would on an Arch installation. In case of a conflict – say, using apt when you have both Debian and Ubuntu strata – you can use brl to ask Bedrock to select the one you wish to use.
The brl command is well documented on the project’s website, which has a wealth of information to help users understand the nitty-gritty of the distro. There’s a lot of tutorial content as well, including a basic usage guide to help you get started, and other pages on work-arounds for common issues, detailed guides on the Bedrock-specific commands, and more.
For the most part the distro works as advertised. But while Bedrock easily installed various strata atop an Ubuntu 18.10-hijacked Bedrock installation without any issues, it refused to install any on a Fedora 29-hijacked installation. Also, while many Arch apps installed on Ubuntu and ran without errors, some like VLC refused to show up alongside other installed apps in the Activities Overview (you could still launch the app from the CLI).
Some apps, such as the GNOME Tweak Tool fetched via the Arch strata, wouldn’t even run on Ubuntu, and complained it couldn’t find a running instance of the GNOME shell. We aren’t really sure whether this is an error or a design limitation of Bedrock: since the strata aren’t really isolated from each other, shouldn’t the Arch stratum be able to detect the GNOME Shell running in the Ubuntu stratum? All strata have their own init process, and you can switch inits, boot into a fetched stratum, reinstall GRUB from within that stratum and then remove the original stratum that you used to install Bedrock.