Volumio in Docker? Why not LXD!

Volumio Development Development talks
1

I do not own a Raspberry. But I have a spare Lenovo Q180 sitting around. Some time ago I installed Volumio on it - I was very pleased. But why use a (almost!) computer just for Volumio? There are two obvious options:

  1. install alongside Volumio. Hm, you are limited to debian 8, 32 bit
  2. install Volumio as docker on whatever 64 bit linux host

I read about running Volumio in a docker. At some point I even started one as a docker. But… limited to whatever audio device (or even none!), and network limitations, etc.

Why not LXD?
It has a smaller footprint then docker.
Starts faster.
Can inherit (somewhat) easily hardware (aka /dev/snd, ethX) from host.

So I began reading. Started from Volumio’s build.sh. Then about LXD in general. Then I cam accross lxd-p2c - the tool that converts a phisical (or VM) machine into a LXC container.

A bit of work, and I now have a working Volumio. As of now, it is not running on the dedicated hardware (see above), but on my desktop. Will be migrated soon…

What I miss: the volumio-remote-updater does not work. Any help on how to trace the entire update process in order to solve this would be highly appreciated.
(in the mean time I will prepare a detailed How-To for those interested)

2

Very interesting approach! Can you contact me at michelangelo at volumio dot org ?

3

bumped into this post as well now, as the x86 version developer I will have a look. I’m sure we can solve the updater issue.

4

Can you at least give a description of the updater process? How can I fine/verbose trace this? Is there a way to have the code for the updater?

5

Sorry, the updater code is not public.
Could you give a more detailed error description instead of “the volumio-remote-updater does not work”?
And tell us which x86 version you installed and are trying to update?

6

“Sorry, the updater code is not public.”
hmm… according to Volumio home page “Free and Open Source Forever” - but I do not want to debate this.

As stated in my initial post I tried to run Volumio as an LXD container on a linux box having LXD installed.

  1. installed Volumio in VirtualBox by converting the Volumio image to a VMDK disk.
  2. in LXD I created a build environment for lxd-p2c based on debian 8 32 bit
  3. installed all dependencies and successfully compiled lxd-p2c binary
  4. copied lxd-p2c to the Volumio VM
  5. run lxd-p2c, thus creating an LXD container. Of course I needed to use a specific LXD profile (closed source???)
    At this point I could run the LXD Volumio container. Could see the GUI, configure music sources and network. Everything looks fine.
    Except for the updater. Looking in journal I see lines like the below (not all log, not entire log lines):
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: PROGRESS: 0, STATUS: “Starting update”, ETA: “6m”
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: PROGRESS: 10, STATUS: “Creating backup”, ETA: “5m”
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: PROGRESS: 30, STATUS: “Downloading new update”, ETA: “4m”
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: zsync done
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: /bin/cp: cannot stat ‘/data/volumio_factory.sqsh’: No such file or directory
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: /bin/rm: cannot remove ‘/data/volumio_factory.sqsh’: No such file or directory
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: PROGRESS: 95, STATUS: “Finalizing update”, ETA: "30s
    volumio-remote-updater[276]: PROGRESS: 100, STATUS: “success”, MESSAGE: “Successfully updated to “2.779” version. System restart required.”
7

you need to do a volumio log from the /dev page, it may give more info. And which version did you start from?