MilkmanAbi/MSL-Images

MSL guest images — v2.0.0

Disk images and the shared kernel for MSL, which runs Linux distributions on macOS using Apple's Virtualization framework.

You do not need to download these by hand. MSL fetches what it needs:

msl install debian        # or any distro below

It reads manifest.json, verifies every download against the SHA-256 in that manifest, and decompresses it for you.

The same files, with the same checksums, are published in two places. MSL tries Hugging Face first and falls back to SourceForge if it cannot be reached, so an outage at either one is not an outage for you:

• https://huggingface.co/datasets/MilkmanAbi/MSL-Images
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/msl-files/

The files here are named for people and web servers; MSL saves each one under its own fixed name.

What is in this release

Twelve distributions, all arm64 (Apple silicon), on one shared kernel — 6.18.54-0-lts, built with vgem and software-GL support so Linux applications can draw.

Distribution	Release
Alpine	3.24
Debian	13 (trixie)
Ubuntu	26.04
Kali	rolling
Arch Linux ARM	rolling
Fedora	44
Rocky Linux	10.2
AlmaLinux	10.2
CentOS Stream	10
Oracle Linux	10.2
openSUSE Leap	16.0
Nix (on Debian 13)	debian13

Each image carries, ready to go:

• MSL's guest daemons — the shell, file-operations, traffic, memory, peripherals and X11 transports, plus msl-maintenance.
• Chromium, so sign-in pages that must finish inside Linux can.
• A working desktop stack — GTK3/GTK4, Qt5/Qt6 with their XDG portal platform themes (which is what makes an application's Open/Save dialog become MSL Files), fonts, zenity, xclip, xdg-utils and D-Bus.
• Software OpenGL — Mesa, libGL, libEGL, and glxinfo for when you need to ask what the renderer is.
• A toolchain — a C compiler, make, git, curl, wget, zsh and nano. MSL builds one small shim inside the guest on first run.
• No snap, anywhere. Snap packages cannot run in an MSL guest, and a distribution's snap stub installs happily and then never starts.

Images are sparse: an 8 GB image is about 1.3–2.6 GB of real data, and .img.xz here is around half a gigabyte each. Linux grows the filesystem to fill whatever disk size you give the instance on its first start.

Verifying a download yourself

shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS

manifest.json carries the same hashes, plus each image's uncompressed size.

Licence

MSL is MIT, except its X11 server (mslgd), which is GPL-3.0; the built application is therefore GPL-3.0 as a whole. The images contain each distribution's own packages under their own licences — MSL does not relicense anything it installs.