I’m currently trying to run distrobox with podman. I’m getting the following error:
Resolved “debian” as an alias (/etc/containers/registries.conf.d/shortnames.conf)
Trying to pull docker.io/library/debian:12…
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 1b13d4e1a46e done
ERRO[0003] While applying layer: ApplyLayer stdout: stderr: potentially insufficient UIDs or GIDs available in user namespace (requested 0:42 for /etc/gshadow): Check Copying blob 1b13d4e1a46e done
Error: copying system image from manifest list: writing blob: adding layer with blob “sha256:1b13d4e1a46e5e969702ec92b7c787c1b6891bff7c21ad378ff6dbc9e751d5d4”: ApplyLayer stdout: stderr: potentially insufficient UIDs or GIDs available in user namespace (requested 0:42 for /etc/gshadow): Check /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid if configured locally and run podman-system-migrate: lchown /etc/gshadow: invalid argument exit status 1
Does anyone know what should be my next steps to resolve this issue?
What’s in /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid?
user@hostname:~$ ls /etc/subuid ls: cannot access ‘/etc/subuid’: No such file or directory user@hostname:~$ ls /etc/subgid ls: cannot access ‘/etc/subgid’: No such file or directory
Well, that’s your problem. sub?id is what defines which uids and gids are available to a user for purposes of making user namespaces. It’s strange that those files don’t already exist; useradd should create them automatically. What distro are you using?
Regardless, you can create those files yourself. Here’s a line from subuid my machine: administrator:100000:65536. The first field is the username (you can also use a uid), the second is the starting uid for the block of uids, and the third field is the number of uids in that block. So uids from 100000-165535 (inclusive) are allocated to the user administrator.
See and for more details.
This was my issue. I had to reboot my machine and now Podman is working properly.
Does this help? https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/12715
You skipped a step or two in your podman setup I think. Look up the rootless instructions, and make absolutely sure you have installed the right uid/gid packages for your distro.
I installed podman using apt. It should come with the neccisary packages correct?
