I’m currently interested in using openSUSE Kalpa (immutable desktop) and I would like to ask about Genymotion Desktop compatibility.
Genymotion is distributed as a .run installer and usually installs files into user directories or /opt, and it also relies on VirtualBox as its backend.
My questions are:
Is it supported or recommended to install and run Genymotion Desktop on openSUSE Kalpa?
If yes, what is the proper approach in an immutable environment?
Using transactional-update
Running it inside Distrobox / container
Or another supported method?
How well does VirtualBox work on Kalpa, considering frequent kernel updates?
If Genymotion Desktop is not recommended, what would be the suggested alternatives for Android testing on Kalpa?
I want to avoid unsupported hacks and keep the system clean and maintainable.
Thanks in advance for any guidance or official recommendations.
I haven’t a clue what Genymotion is or does, but if it’s just an application and the .run installs it into some variation of $HOME/.local or the like, it doesn’t affect Kalpa at all, as it’s all within the users home directory.
Your other option is of course to install it in a distrobox with an alternate $HOME if you’re worried about containment.
e.g. distrobox create -n foo -H /home/somedirectory
Virtualbox is a no-go, and won’t ever be supported in Kalpa. kvm/qemu through the virt-manager flatpak with the user session extension works quite well, as does the gnome-boxes flatpak for most of your virtualization needs.
I already tried running the Genymotion .run installer inside an Ubuntu container on Kalpa. The installation itself worked and the application could be launched successfully. However, when I tried to start a virtual device, it did not work.
I checked the virtualization options in Genymotion and found only two backends available: QEMU and VirtualBox. I then tried installing KVM on the host system using transactional-update, rebooted the system, and tested again, but the Genymotion virtual device still could not start.
I would like to try again by installing Kalpa directly on my PC. Unfortunately, during the installation process I did not see any partitioning options, so I was afraid it might wipe my entire NVMe disk.
Thank you once again for the help. Kalpa is very interesting, and I really hope there will be an official release with a proper installer in the future. Keep up the great work!
One more question: when I run the installer, I don’t see any option to select which disk Kalpa will be installed on. Since my PC has multiple disks, this makes me a bit nervous.
If I want to install Kalpa on just one specific disk, should I physically unplug the SATA cables from the other disks to be on the safe side?
that is a good question, that I don’t actually have an answer to, let me try an install on a machine with multiple disks, as I’ve not done that in a while
Thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time to test this multi-disk scenario.
I would personally love to try it myself as well, but unfortunately I don’t currently have a “safe” disk available for testing — there’s important data on all of my drives, so I have to be extra careful.
Hopefully, in the future, the installer can be improved to make disk selection clearer, so users can confidently choose an empty disk intended for Kalpa without worrying about accidentally wiping other drives.
