LinuxPizza

chroot

Have you ever installed packages from third party repositories to later realize that it was not the best idea? No? Well – I have.

But from now on, I wont do it. And instead utilize chroot!

In this section, we'll cover how you do it on your Debian-based system aswell as on Fedora.

Install the package debootstrap

apt update; apt install debootstrap

Or if you are on Fedora:

dnf install debootstrap

Now, create a catalogue anywhere of your choosing, for example in /srv

mkdir /srv/chroot

Great. Now depending on what you want. Perform any of the following:

debootstrap bullseye /srv/chroot http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian
debootstrap  jammy /srv/chroot http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

You should see it pull down all the packages needed for the distro to start, and when it is complete – you can enter the chroot:

chroot /srv/chroot

That's it! Now you can install, test or compile your packages as usual.

And when you are done, you can simply remove the catalogue and start fresh – if you want.

Here is a quick demo of the actual process:

asciicast

#linux #chroot #sysadmin #debian #ubuntu #fedora