Does SCALE fully support APT?

TrueNAS General
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Hi everyone,

I’m considering creating a home server mostly for backup reasons, maybe running some VMs or containers as needed, maybe adding some remote management like SaltStack for a few Windows laptops.

In the past at work, I used Proxmox and while it’s some sort of product on it’s own, I was easily able to use APT at the shell to install all sorts of software Proxmox didn’t bundle by default. In many cases just minor missing shell tools, runtimes like Python or something to support software otherwise deployed using GitHub etc. I would like to avoid the need to setup a container for all of those use-cases, some things are easier the old package manager way in my opinion.

If I didn’t understand things wrongly, SCALE is based on some Debian like Proxmox. So I expect to be able to use APT, possibly even add additional 3rd party repos etc. OTOH, I’ve found requests like adding 7zip which make me wonder if I’m wrong, because that should be easy using APT.

So what’s the point here, does SCALE support APT and possibly 3rd party repos?

Thanks!

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No. TrueNAS is and always has been an appliance, and does not support installing additional software in the base OS.

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Really in terms of doesn’t work at all or more likely might work, but nobody tests and is going to help you? So APT might not even be fully installed in the base image?

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TrueNAS is an appliance OS. apt is not even available to users; to update, you load a complete image to replace the previous image.
Use a sandbox to install your own software.

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You can enable dev mod, and use apt just fine, the only problem is your system will literally be flagged as “unsupported” thus IX literally does not “support APT” but it works fine.

Your choice.

Or use a sandbox (similar to LXC)

Mind you, if you have an issue, and you can reproduce it without dev mode enabled… ie by downloading your config and re-uploading to a fresh install, I’m guessing that will be supported.