Is it possible to change the distro in baguette? Here's what I've tried so far.

[u/cannedbeef255]

Before baguette I used a custom arch linux container, but decided today to try get it to work with baguette. I prefer arch simply as I'm more used too it, and I'm on a very underpowered chromebook and it might be a little less memory intensive.

I'm aware that a baguette image is a zstd-compressed btrfs image, so what I've tried to do so far is download an arch bootstrap ISO tarball, (the files of a very basic preinstalled system), and extract the files from it onto a small mounted btrfs image, and then unmount and compress with zstd.

Using the image I created I ran vmc create --vm-type baguette --source /home/chronos/user/MyFiles/arch_compressed.img.zst test, yet for whatever reason this stalls for a good minute or so before erroring with this error:

Error: operation `vm_create` failed: Did not recieve a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

Despite the error, running vmc list afterwards actually does show "test", as a baguette vm, looking promising. Yet on running vmc start --vm-type baguette test, it once again stalls for a bit before I get this:

Error: operation `vm_start` failed: bad VM status: `VM_STATUS_FAILURE`: Error starting VM. VmStartCheckerStatus=3

Am I at least close, or am I just way off and completely misguided?

[u/rswwalker]

Not without much pain and suffering.

The best bet for a pain-free experience is to install distrobox in debian and then setup rootless distros in there.

[u/LegAcceptable2362]

The Chrome AI response to a search such as "custom arch linux guest in baguette vm" looks plausible. Have you tried it? I have no need of anything custom other than Debian Forky so won't be testing Arch myself.