Stop bloating your system – use 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:
