There can be situations arising, when you need to perform some kind of specific task Endless OS is not directly built for. But thanks to the flexibility of Linux in general, such situations can be mastered without hassle. One technology that can help you in such situations is Podman, which, in a nutshell, allows you to run a complete instance of another Linux based operating system side-by-side and hand-in-hand with Endless OS.
As an example, Podman can be used for the following tasks:
The following example demonstrates how to quickly get up and running with an Ubuntu container inside Endless. Podman has many additional advanced capabilities which you can explore later.
From the Terminal app:
Create the container for Ubuntu
podman container create --detach --tty --interactive --name Ubuntu ubuntu:20.04 /usr/bin/bash
Start the container
podman start Ubuntu
Run a command inside the container
podman exec --interactive --tty Ubuntu /usr/bin/bash
The first step is only necessary once, as the container is persistent. Prior to executing commands in the container, you need to start the container, so the second step is only necessary once after each reboot of your workstation. The last step is to execute something inside the container. This can be any command installed. Most of the time this will be a shell like bash to interactively work inside the container.