sandbox 0.2 released and packaged !

Yesterday, while enjoying the snow falling outside (finally!) I went through my TODO list for sandbox and implemented most of what was on it.

Ext4 support for the copy-on-write partition

You can now have the copy-on-write stored on disk instead of RAM memory (tmpfs).
The tmpfs support is still available as an option for these who have plenty of RAM or don’t have a separate /home (due to the aufs limitation).

Nautilus extension

sandbox now has a nautilus extension which lets you start any executable binary/script directly in a sandbox.

Updated GUI

The GUI is no longer showing any option by default and just “does the right thing” (in most cases).

All the options being hidden behind “Show sandbox options”.

Released and packaged it

Finally, I released sandbox 0.2 (0.1 wasn’t in a packagable state) and packaged it for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal.
It’s made of 3 different packages:

• sandbox: The command line utility and the C part.
• sandbox-gui: The python GUI and .desktop file (Applications -> System Tools -> sandbox)
• sandbox-nautilus: The nautilus extension, you need to restart nautilus to have it to load

The packages (for natty) can be found in my experimental PPA: https://launchpad.net/~stgraber/+archive/experimental/
and code is still available at: https://code.launchpad.net/~stgraber/+junk/sandbox

For now, everything is called “sandbox” which is more of a concept than an actual project name. As it’s becoming more and more of an actual project and I’m quite bad at finding good names, I’m open for suggestions of a better name for that thing.

Update: Release 0.2.1 which auto-detect separate /home partition and fall-back to tmpfs when necessary. Packages are available for Natty (Ubuntu 11.04) and Maverick (Ubuntu 10.10).