Can't download Docker Desktop for RHEL

Docker Desktop
1

Hi,

I’m running Rocky Linux (8 and 9) on my workstation and my laptop. I’d like to install Docker Desktop to follow a course about Kubernetes. Unfortunately the RPM is nowhere to be found. I spent the best part of an hour trying to find a download link, but to no avail. Looks like the Docker team is playing hide & seek with this software.

Any suggestions ?

Cheers from the sunny South of France !

Niki

2

RHEL support is in Early Acces, so it is possible that not everyone can download the RPM

If the architecture of your Rocky Linux is amd64, you can try the release notes

There is an “RPM” link for the releases.

1 Like
3

Thank you for getting back on this.

Is “Early Access” some sort of special membership group ? Can any user be part of that ? And if so, how ?

Noted for the RPM link, but I’m a bit puzzled: will they work on both RHEL 8 and 9 ?

Cheers,

Niki

4

Tried this on a Rocky Linux 8 installation. Here’s the result:

# dnf install ./docker-desktop-x86_64.rpm 
Error: 
 Problem: conflicting requests
  - nothing provides qemu-system-x86 >= 5.2.0 needed by docker-desktop-4.32.0-157355.x86_64 from @commandline

So the package is broken on RHEL 8.

I’ll setup a RHEL 9 sandbox and check out if I have some luck with this.

If any Docker package maintainers read this: please get your act together.

5

And here’s the result on a Rocky Linux 9 installation :slight_smile:

Error: 
 Problem: conflicting requests
  - nothing provides qemu-system-x86 >= 5.2.0 needed by docker-desktop-4.32.0-157355.x86_64 from @commandline

Conclusion : Docker Desktop is unusable on RHEL 8 and RHEL 9.

6

You could probably install the latest Qemu from another repository if the default does not have it. If not, you can try Podman Desktop. It runs Podman, not Docker, but it is similar, especially when you don’t run Podman natively on Linux as both Docker Desktop and Podman Desktop runs a virtual machine to run containers. As far as I know, it tries to support Docker Desktop extensions. Since Podman was developed by Red Hat, that must work on Red Hat distributions.

7

I need Docker Desktop, because I have to teach a course about Docker (not Podman) at our local university. Yes I know they’re similar. But some things work only with Docker and not with Podman. Plus, I need the integrated Kubernetes test environment.

That being said, I figured it out. The package maintainers did a shit job (and have done so apparently for the last dozen releases or so).

The RPMs have a dependency on qemu-system-x86_64, which doesn’t exist in RHEL or any RHEL clone. So I setup the repositories, installed the dependencies manually except Qemu. Then I setup KVM/libvirt which has qemu-kvm under the hood, symlinked /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm to /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 and then installed the docker-desktop package using rpm -ivh --nodeps.

Looks like everything works perfectly now.

My suggestion: fire your package maintainer and hire someone who knows some Linux packaging basics.

Cheers,

Niki

8

Since this is a community forum, we can’t hire anyone :slight_smile: You can share your feedbacks on GitHub

Thank you for sharing your solution.

9

On a side note : the download link in the release notes says RPM. The least minimum should be an indication whether it’s meant for RHEL 8, for RHEL 9 or for Fedora.

A package for RHEL 8 usually sports an el8 tag in the package name. Similarly, RHEL 9 compatible packages have el9 in the denomination.

One of your developers declared on Twitter that the RPM packages are only for Fedora, and there are no RHEL packages available. So which one is it? And why list Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the list of supported distributions when it’s (maybe) not?

As far as I can tell, in the current state of things your documentation and your RPM releases are one big mess.

10

I understand you, but most of us here are just community members like you. Some of us has a little bit more permission on the forum, but that’s all. So if you really want the developers to know what you think they did wrong, the best if you share it on GitHub. Docker staff members rarely reply in topics so I’m not sure how soon they would see your message here,

Regarding package naming, I agree, but it was just a guess from me that the RPM link could be used for RHEL. I didn’t even know RHEL was in the documentation of Docker Desktop until someone asked about it in the forum, when I also noted that when you open the RHEL page, the menu disappears, so yes, something is wrong with the documentation. As I suggested in a previous topic as well, you can click on “Request changes” on the top right corner. I haven’t done it, since I don’t use RHEL based distros often and when I sometimes do, I still don’t use Docker Desktop on Linux actively, only on macOS. On Linux, I use Docker CE.

I’m also not in any Early Access program, so I minute ago I couldn’t have told you how you could get the installer, but since I use Docker CE on Linux and I know, that RHEL prefers their own container engine, Podman, I checked the Docker Engine support on RHEL and found this which should have been mentioned in the Docker Desktop documentation:

Docker Desktop for Linux is also available for RHEL.

To get access, join the Early Access Program.

So again, the documentation should absolutely be improved, but the right place to ask for it is GitHub.

Apparently that’s right.