Use linux apps on mac

Bring Linux apps to the Mac Desktop with Docker

If you use Linux as your host operating system then with one or two commands you can have most graphical Linux applications up and running on your desktop in seconds. Package managers like apt-get , yum and pacman make installing new software almost seamless. If you are running an XWindows server (which you probably are) then getting a graphical application to appear on your screen from a remote Linux system or a Docker container can be as simple as setting the DISPLAY environmental variable.

But macOS though?

Many applications that exist for Linux also exist for Mac: Chrome, FireFox, VLC Player, Slack, Arduino IDE etc. In some cases they have been ported and re-built natively and even optimized to take advantage of the OS.

So why would you want to run Linux versions of apps on your Mac?

Here are a few reasons why you may want to use Docker to run Linux applications on macOS:

• To access to newer versions of software
• To test various versions of the same software simultaneously
• To use tools which may not be ported to macOS yet
• For sandboxing an application:
• To tighten up on security
• or to isolate and/or spy on network traffic

Since Docker provides a sandboxed environment for applications that means you can add/remove just the capabilities you want and tighten up on security.

Several paid tools exist for macOS to isolate network traffic and push it down different HTTP proxies or SOCKS tunnels depending on custom rulesets. This is ideal if you frequently work on public WiFi networks or behind a restrictive corporate network. By using your own hosted proxy server or VPN you can protect some or all of your traffic. So why pay for something you can do for free with Docker?

Slack for Linux running on the Mac Desktop in El Captain

Step-by-step

Here’s what you need to do to bring X11 to your Desktop.

1. Install an X11 server

An X11 server exists for MacOS which allows applications like XTerm to run and display output on your local computer. It’s packaged up as the XQuartz project and can be installed with brew:

$ brew install Caskroom/cask/xquartz ==> brew cask install Caskroom/cask/xquartz ==> Creating Caskroom at /usr/local/Caskroom ==> Downloading https://dl.bintray.com/xquartz/downloads/XQuartz-2.7.9.dmg ################################## 100.0% 

2. Build your Dockerfile

Once you have XQuartz set up you can then install your favourite graphical Linux apps into a Debian container or whichever distribution you prefer.

FROM debian:stretch ENV LC_ALL en_US.UTF-8 ENV LANG en_US.UTF-8 RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \ apt-transport-https \ ca-certificates \ curl \ gconf2 \ gconf-service \ gvfs-bin \ hunspell-en-us \ libasound2 \ libgtk2.0-0 \ libnotify4 \ libnss3 \ libxss1 \ libxtst6 \ locales \ python \ xdg-utils \ libgnome-keyring0 \ gir1.2-gnomekeyring-1.0 \ libappindicator1 \ --no-install-recommends \ && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* RUN echo "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.gen \ && locale-gen en_US.utf8 \ && /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 ADD ./slack-desktop-2.1.0-amd64.deb ./ RUN dpkg -i slack-desktop-2.1.0-amd64.deb ENTRYPOINT ["slack"] 

I adapted this Dockerfile from one that Jess Frazelle came up with. It appeared to be broken when I tried it so I’ve added some more packages to fix the runtimes errors I encountered.

You may also be asking yourself why I’ve added slack from the local filesystem instead of using wget or curl . If you need to fetch the binary from a specific HTTP proxy or VPN tunnel then you may not want Docker to handle that.

Run this before building the Dockerfile or move it back into the file itself as a RUN step:

$ wget https://downloads.slack-edge.com/linux_releases/slack-desktop-2.1.0-amd64.deb 

Most packages are available in package repositories or PPAs so apt-get could be used, but Slack is an exception to the rule.

3. Set up XQuartz for network connections

By default XQuartz will listen on a UNIX socket, which is private and only exists on local our filesystem. This means Docker won’t be able to access it.

Install and run socat to create a tunnel from an open X11 port (6000) through to the local UNIX socket where XQuartz is listening for connections:

$ socat TCP-LISTEN:6000,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CLIENT:\"$DISPLAY\" 

This will block, so open a new tab or terminal.

4. Start the application

Build your Dockerfile, then start it by passing in an environmental variable for the DISPLAY so your graphical application knows where to show itself. Change the IP address of 192.168.0.15 to whatever you see on ifconfig .

$ wget https://downloads.slack-edge.com/linux_releases/slack-desktop-2.1.0-amd64.deb $ docker build -t slack:2.1.0 $ docker run -e DISPLAY=192.168.0.15:0 --name slack -d slack:2.1.0 

For extra points you could:

• Use docker-compose to make starting/stopping the app easier and manage the container
• Bind-mount an options directory so the container can ‘remember’ your communities. I.e.
• -v /home/alex/.slack:/root/.config/slack
• Use a script to find the IP address to insert into the DISPLAY variable.
• Create a docker-compose.yml file for easy starting/stopping of the application. (See below)

4.1 Note on proxies:

If you want an app such as Slack to use a HTTP_PROXY then you can pass in the environmental variable at runtime. Here’s an example with a docker-compose.yml file for convenience:

version: "2.0" services: slack: image: slack:2.1.0 environment: - HTTP_PROXY=http://192.168.0.10:8080 - HTTPS_PROXY=http://192.168.0.10:8080 - DISPLAY=192.168.0.10:0 volumes: - .slack_config:/root/.config/Slack networks: - default 

5. Wrapping up

X11 forwarding from Docker to Linux is fast and can be accelerated by sharing additional resources such as /dev/video0 or /dev/shm , unfortunately this is not possible with Docker on macOS. When forwarding apps from Docker to XQuartz you may find that they do not run correctly or have unexpected lag. This may be because hardware acceleration and use of the GPU is not available, but the applications may still be useable enough for you to get the benefits.

See also:

Acknowledgements:

Most of what I’ve outlined above came from reading a Github issue from 2015: Docker issue #8710.

For examples of running popular Linux apps on the Linux Desktop see Jess’ Containers on the Desktop blog post.

Let me know if you know of any way of accelerating the performance of X11-forwarded apps on macOS. Or if you have any other tips or hacks, send me a tweet @alexellisuk or post a comment.

Alex Ellis

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Is it possible to install Linux packages on OS X?

I know that the Mac commandline is very similar to that of Linux operating systems, so it would be nice to use some features of Linux in my Mac, specially installing Linux packages. For example, in Linux we can install a package by simply typing sudo apt-get install «package name» at the prompt. Is it possible to do something like this on Mac?

3 Answers 3

Yes, it is possible to install and run a variety of UNIX applications on OS X. There are a few solutions out there, my choice and recommendation is Homebrew. I’ve found other solutions to be overly complex and unwieldy.

in linux terminal installing command does any thing automatically it downloads files and . how about Homebrew? is it required to download files manually?

@peaceman once you’ve set up Homebrew, it downloads all the dependencies and files you need for any package you install from its repository. It’s a beautiful thing, really.

@CajunLuke for one MacPorts will install duplicates of everything it needs. Don’t want another bzip2? Too bad, you’re getting one. Brew on the other hand leverages the existing system. I have 23 packages I like to install. With Macports that balloons with dependancies to 144 packages. With Homebrew, only 44. That’s what I call «overly complex». You should seriously try Homebrew. You’ll like it better.

Like I said, you should seriously try it. It’s easier to manage, it’s easier to use, it’s easier to fix and it’s easier to contribute. I’m not trying to win. Just see for yourself, then pick the one you prefer.

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Emulating Linux binaries under Mac OS X

How do I run Linux binaries under Mac OS X? Googling around I found a couple of emulators but none for running Linux binaries on a Mac. There are quite a few posts about running Mac OS X on Linux and that kind of stuff — but that’s the opposite of what I want to do. Update: Thanks for all the answers! I am fully aware of MacPorts and Fink or any of the other things; and no, I do not want any of these utilities, and I do not want any of the package managers, I prefer to compile things myself. I also have Parallels and could set up virtual machines and all that jazz. The only thing I want to do is to find a way to run a binary that I do not have the source code for and has been compiled for Linux, but I do not want to run it under Linux but under Mac OS X. Therefore my question about emulators.

If your just looking to run software from the *nix/POSIX world it will probably compile provided it doesn’t depend on OS specific libraries. Fink or MacPorts can help with this somewhat.

I can’t think of any software that’s available for Linux, but not for Mac (sadly, since I’m a Linux guy). Why are you looking for such a thing?

Great question! I too, have a piece of enterprise software that runs in Linux, but my development machine is a Mac. Hopefully someone comes up with a solution — emulation layer for Linux binaries on Mac.

7 Answers 7

Well there is a project introducing something like Linux’s binfmt_misc to OS X so now what you need is an ELF loader, a dynamic linker that can load both Mach-O and ELF, and some mechanism to translate Linux calls to OS X ones.

Just for inspiration, you can implement the dynamic linker in the fashion that it ignores filename extension — both libfoo.so.1 (as an Linux ELF) and libfoo.1.dylib (as an Mach-O) can be loaded so that OS X versions of system libraries can be reused so that you do not need to write a «hosted on OS X» libc.so and syscalls can be handled by an kext that translates Linux calls to OS X ones in kernel.

Or, in an more elegant way, implement a stripped down Linux kernel as a kext that makes the OS X kernel a dual-purpose. However that will require you to use two sets of libraries. (Binaries do not clash so it is largely okay)

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