Creating containers: how can I add more distro images to the GUI tools?

I’m using Kionite and I know how to create a container with “Kontainer”, “distroshelf” and “Podman”. But the problem I have is, that in my installation “Kontainer” does not include any images, and distro shelf has some images (for example, Fedora 43) but does not include images I want (for example, Debian 13).

Where do those apps get the images from to begin with and how do i add them? I just installed them as flatpack.

Podman seems to have an option to import images. I downloaded a Debian 13 iso, but that just gave me some errors.

I used “Kontainer” in aurora, and that had images. So, I assume those distro makers included the images.

It would be good if i could include common distro images like Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and Arch in a current version.

The purpose is, to give a user a GUI way to run a software that isn’t available as flatpak.

You cannot “boot” an ISO in a container. Instead, you must pull the official Debian container image.

podman pull debian:13

Another option is to use distrobox

distrobox create --name debian-testing --image debian:13
distrobox enter debian-testing

So those GUI tools don’t have a GUI option to populate the list of available images?

What determines what images they come with when I install them? i had used Kontainer on this installation before and don’t remember how back then i was able to use it, but it had images available. but meanwhile i had-d-installed it and re-installed it, and it has zero images to choose from. and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to get images.

We maintain container images for various distributions to use with distrobox/toolbox at GitHub - toolbx-images/images: Community maintained container images to use with toolbx and distrobox · GitHub, which is likely what Kontainer/Distroshelf use.

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