From January 26th to 28th, I participated in the Global Game Jam 2024 at ETH Zurich, where I was part of a team of five. We worked on a game around the theme “Make Me Laugh” for 48 hours and had the game CArT Lander as our final product. We decided to use Plastic SCM for version control. Unfortunately, it is not available on my system, Garuda Linux. But the tool distrobox turned out to be the a perfect solution that resolved the problem.

distrobox

The distrobox resides in the extra repository and can be downloaded using pacman with the command sudo pacman -S distrobox.

Create a container with desired configuration

# Create a container using distrobox-create --name container-name --image os-image:version
distrobox-create --name ubuntu-20 --image ubuntu:20.04

# Enter the container
distrobox-enter ubuntu-20

# Check container status
distrobox-list

Once we can successfully access the shell of the newly created container, we just need to follow the installation instructions of your chosen linux distribution as on official Plastic SCM website.

# 1. ADD THE PLASTIC SCM REPOSITORY
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https
echo "deb https://www.plasticscm.com/plasticrepo/stable/ubuntu/ ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plasticscm-stable.list
wget https://www.plasticscm.com/plasticrepo/stable/ubuntu/Release.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update

# 2. INSTALL PLASTIC SCM (default installation)
sudo apt-get install plasticscm-complete

Once the installation is done, check that the plastic scm is working with some commands like cm --help. The last step is to export the application from the container to our host.

# Run inside of the container, and integrate the application with our desktop.
distrobox-export --app cm

Summary

With distrobox, one can containerize a desired application that is not avaliable for current platform. For lightweight applications such as Plastic SCM, this approach works out smoothly and is highly recommended.