Linux Fu: Atomic Power

People are well aware of the power of virtual machines. If you want to do something dangerous — say, hack on the kernel — you can create a virtual machine, snapshot it, screw it up a few times, restore it, and your main computer never misses a beat. But sometimes you need just a little shift in perspective, not an entire make belive computer. For example, you are building a new boot disk and you want to pretend it is the real boot disk and make some updates. For that there is chroot, a Linux command that lets you temporarily open processes that think the root of the filesystem is in a different place than the real root. The problem is, it is hard to manage a bunch of chroot environments which is why they created Atoms.


The system works with several common distributions and you install it via Flatpak. That means you can launch, for example, a shell that thinks it is running Gentoo or Centos Linux under Ubuntu.



Creating an atom is easy

Using the tool is easy enough.  A simple screen lets you choose a few options. The first time you use a particular image it will take a few minutes to download everything.


Eventually, you’ll wind up with a list of all your chroot environments. Selecting one of them (initially, the only one) will give you a screen where you can browse files, expose a few mount points, change the chroot’s name, or wipe it out. You can also open a console into the selected environment directly.


linux atomic power