Quick Start

Setup

First, if you have never used containers at DLS before, then you must do an initial podman setup:

/dls_sw/apps/setup-podman/setup.sh

Note

If you have previously used podman you may need to perform a migration. See Updating Podman Settings

Update for August 2024

  • Centos is end of life so we have switched to using the centos rpm package ‘vault’ instead of mirrors.

  • missing dependencies for building EPICS 7 have been added (libusb 1.0 and libnet)

  • due to dependency clashes we had to remove GUI apps such as firefox

To run the latest dev c7 with libusb 1.0 and NO GUI apps:

c7 -dv 2024.8.1

To run a version with older libusb and original set of GUI apps:

c7 -dv 2024.8.1gui

Startup Script “c7”

Next, copy the startup script to your local bin directory and make it executable.

cd $HOME/bin
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dls-controls/dev-c7/main/c7
chmod +x c7

Finally, launch an instance of the container by typing:

c7

That’s it. For further options see More Features

Note

if don’t have a $HOME/bin folder then you will need to do mkdir $HOME/bin. It will automatically be added to your PATH in any new shells, but the current shell won’t see it.

Note

For the first invocation of an updated version of the container there will be a 30 second delay while the filesystem user id namespace mapping is cached. This will happen after the image is pulled from the registry.

How to Work

At a dev-c7 prompt you can work normally as if you were sitting at a RHEL7 workstation. Everything should work as before although there are a few differences, see RHEL7 native vs dev-c7.

If you find anything that does not work or have suggestions for improvement, please report it On GitHub Issues.

  • You can launch multiple instances of dev-c7 and they will share the same container.

  • You can run gnome-terminal and open multiple tabs - all will be in the container

  • You can use module load as usual to make further software from dls_sw available

  • You can run GUI apps as normal.

  • You have full sudo rights and can install anything you need into the container with yum install

  • Do NOT run vscode inside the container. Instead run it normally and feel free to launch dev-c7 inside of its integrated terminals to do compilation, testing.

Install edm fonts

If you are using edm and the fonts look wrong or you get errors about missing fonts, then read on. This should not be required for RHEL8 machines at DLS which should already have the fonts installed.

The edm display manager uses local fonts that need to be installed on your host.

Again, these should be part of the standard RHEL8 installation but early adopters may need to install them as follows:

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dls-controls/dev-c7/main/edm-fonts/install-fonts.sh)