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Canonical Multipass – Ubuntu VMs on demand for any workstation

by 3ds on 11/11/21, 4:39 PM with 53 comments

  • by Havoc on 11/11/21, 7:41 PM

    Hoping for canonical's sake I've just got a broken install, cause the UX is somewhere between nonexistent and useless.

    Install & restart. Nothing happens. OK lets launch it. Nothing happens. Lets try that again. Nothing happens. Check windows notification area...ah three copies running silently now. Left click on one. Nothing happens. Right click & close two. Spot a open shell thing in the menu. Click on that it starts a powershell window that says "Starting primary" for 5 mins. No idea what that means but I guess it did uhm something. And then closes itself. Staring at empty (windows) desktop again.

    Right click on menu again...says "Start primary" is Running. I don't see anything? Let's try the shell again...open a powershell window which instantly closes itself? Back to staring at my wallpaper.

    OK let's try stopping this mystery thing that is apparently running. Nothing happens. Try to start it. Nothing. Try the shell again. Now its back to the 5 mins of "Starting primary".

    Window disappears. Again.

    OK lets try this a different way. Open my own powershell window copy command it. 5 mins of "Starting foo" later.

    >launch failed: The following errors occurred: >foo: timed out waiting for response

    ...and uninstall

  • by tyingq on 11/11/21, 6:03 PM

    It's in their docs, but not on this page. If you're confused about what this is:

    "Multipass is a mini-cloud on your workstation using native hypervisors of all the supported plaforms (Windows, macOS and Linux)"

    (Which sounds a bit like docker desktop, just using VMs instead of containers)

    https://multipass.run/docs

  • by xriddle on 11/11/21, 5:14 PM

  • by pacifika on 11/11/21, 5:49 PM

    Seeing how often virtualbox breaks things and the swiftness with which this spins up a throwaway vm, it has some potential for a faster dev project host.

  • by rcarmo on 11/11/21, 8:51 PM

    I liked the idea of it until I realized I could not run it as a non-admin user on the Mac because they had not designed the app in a way that allowed for it - the control socket was inaccessible to my "regular" user.

    Issue has been open since March 2020: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1437

  • by eatonphil on 11/11/21, 5:05 PM

    Off topic but prompted because Fedora and Ubuntu sites keep pushing in this direction... Do you use snap or flatpak? Preferring not to learn a new technology in this space, I've stuck with apt-get and dnf. I guess the dichotomy is that snap/flatpak are for (desktop) applications whereas the system package managers are more for system packages? Neither flatpak or snap seem very common outside of desktop environments (i.e. server deploys or Docker environments).

    Curious to hear from others about your experience with either flatpak or snap.

  • by ffhhj on 11/12/21, 5:14 AM

    Silly question, what do you use Multipass for? I mean, real world applications for these VMs, do you use it for continuos integration, server prototyping? To isolate frameworks/APIs?

  • by rainboiboi on 11/12/21, 12:29 AM

    Just curious - are there anyone using this at scale? Multipass has existed for quite some time and I frequently go back to the website to check for new features but always see the same thing.

  • by quadrifoliate on 11/11/21, 5:09 PM

    I'm quoting their copy here to make sure my criticism is accurate:

    > Ubuntu VMs on demand for any workstation

    What does this get me over VirtualBox?

    > Get an instant Ubuntu VM with a single command.

    Vagrant? Maybe the "single command" is good? Am I just being too much of a mounting-it-locally-with-curlftpfs guy?

    > Multipass can launch and run virtual machines and configure them with cloud-init like a public cloud.

    I am already confused. Are these VMs on a public cloud or not? If they are on my local machine, it's not really a test of the cloud (hint: Testing problems with virtual machines is not the difficult part of simulating a cloud on your computer, testing the possible failures with the other 200- hosted message queues and databases is). Again, what is this getting me over Vagrant or Virtualbox?

    > Prototype your cloud launches locally for free.

    I am still at a loss to understand what exactly is the selling point of this tool. Is it literally just "vagrant, but for Ubuntu"? I really don't get it.