How to Get LXD Running on Ubuntu Touch (Focal & Noble)

[arubislander]

How to Get LXD Running on Ubuntu Touch (Focal & Noble)

Here's a rough walkthrough on getting LXD running on UT based on my experience.

If you're on Ubuntu Touch Focal, you’ll need to enable snap support first. Install Snapz0r from the Open Store, run it and initialize snap support. If you're on Noble you can skip this step, since snap support is already enabled.

Next, install LXD. I used version 5.21 specifically, because newer versions gave me trouble on the JingPad. You can install it like this:

$ sudo snap install lxd --channel=5.21/stable

Once LXD is installed, initialize it with:

$ sudo lxd init

Accept all the defaults except for the storage backend. When prompted, choose dir instead of zfs, which tends to be problematic in this environment.

After that, you need to adjust the default profile to allow nested containers and privileged access:

$ sudo lxc profile set default security.nesting true
$ sudo lxc profile set default security.privileged true

Now you can launch your first container. For example, to create one based on Ubuntu Noble:

$ sudo lxc launch ubuntu:noble noble-1

Wait for the container to boot. You can check its status with:

$ sudo lxc list

Once it's up, you can enter the container with:

$ sudo lxc exec noble-1 -- bash

At this point, you should be inside a fully functional Ubuntu container running on Ubuntu Touch.

EDIT (24-09-2025) : It has come to my attention that, while this procedure should work for most devices, the resulting containers may not have functioning internet access. At the time of writing I tried this on my Pixel 3a and my Jingpad, and with both this worked well. However on a OnePlus Nord N10, a FairPhone 4 and 5, this resulted in containers that did not have internet access. Even pinging to 8.8.8.8 resulted in a permission denied error. So ymmv.

[harrisonpatm]

Unfortunately, didn't work for me. Snapz0r ran and rebooted the device, but afterwords snap still wasn't enabled. Mounting root to rw and attempting to install snapd via apt also didn't work, I'm assuming because of dependency issues and/or not enough space on the small root partition. Thanks though.

[arubislander]

@harrisonpatm said in How to Get LXD Running on Ubuntu Touch (Focal & Noble):

Unfortunately, didn't work for me. Snapz0r ran and rebooted the device, but afterwords snap still wasn't enabled.

This is on your Pixel 3a XL? And you are running an unmodified Focal (i.e. no additional packages installed via apt on the rootfs)?

[harrisonpatm]

@arubislander Nope, I have added a few apt packages already. And honestly I'm probably about to reinstall from scratch, so I'm sure I'll give this another try.

[arubislander]

@harrisonpatm Please do! And let us know how you get on.

[fredldotme]

@arubislander Regarding containers not having access to the internet: It might be the device is using "Paranoid Android Networking" in the kernel, stemming from Android, which limits use of sockets to a special group ID.

To device maintainers wanting to support LXD, you will want to check whether CONFIG_ANDROID_PARANOID_NETWORK is in your kernel tree (simply grep recursively for it) and if so, set CONFIG_ANDROID_PARANOID_NETWORK=n in your defconfig. I've since fixed this on the FP4 and verified working networking on the FP5.