best container technology for running certain programs
 

So there is a program that has been unsupported for ten or so years called Graycstoration. Part of its functionality has been moved into Gimp. Its inpainting feature has not. My current Linux is 64 bit only so Graycstoration will not run.

There is a program called MindGuard. It's a fun little program ... but it uses GTK, which pretty much has disapeared. To clarify: gtk. not gtk2 nor gtk3. Slackware as of 2015 or so still has gtk and I think gentoo still has it in its repos.

I've yet to get any spreadsheet program to compile on my LFS system. This has been a long-running battle. I would love to just grab one and all its deps from some other distro. Let's get specific: I'd like to use Gnumeric.

So.

What container technology would be good for running these programs? Lxc? Lxd? Telvanni? Docker? All three programs I named are GUI, so would need access to Xorg. None of the programs uses the network. Two of the programs would need to read and write files.

Thank you.

hm, I would say containers are not the best when you need gui. Probably a VM will be easier.

You could use LXD and follow the tutorial at https://blog.simos.info/how-to-run-g...buntu-desktop/
However, in your case, you issue is that there is no ready-made Ubuntu 8.04 (or similarly old version) that you could easily use.

Your use-case is interesting, since there is no need for an internet connection, there is no requirement for security updates.

There is a recent discussion about creating a container image for Ubuntu 8.04 at https://lists.linuxcontainers.org/pi...ry/012768.html
It should be possible to do so, and I think it would be useful to be able to boot up old images are containers.