Description

salix-chroot-install is a small script that runs from within a Salix installation, takes a Salix iso and performs an installation to a directory in your hard drive. That directory can then be accessed as a separate "installation" using chroot.

Installation

You can install salix-chroot-install on your Salix system with:

sudo spi -i salix-chroot-install

Usage

You can run it like this:

sudo salix-chroot-install -d /destination/dir -i /path/to/salix.iso

You then get the usual choice of Full/Basic/Core and nothing much more than that. Once it finishes, you'll have an almost complete Salix installation under that destination dir. You can now use chroot to access that installation.

A nice tool to do that the easy way is schroot, which your can install with:

sudo spi -i schroot

Once it is installed, you'll need to inform schroot about your salix-in-a-chroot installation. You can do that by creating a file with contents similar to these in your /etc/schroot/chroot.d/ directory:

[salix-14.1]
description=Salix 14.1 32-bit
directory=/home/george/salix/chroot/salix-14.1
users=george
root-users=george
personality=linux32
type=directory

Of course you'll need to swap the username with yours and adjust the directory. For 32bit chroots in a 64bit system, you'll need the personality line. For 64bit chroots in 64bit systems or 32bit chroots in 32bit systems, you'll need to remove it.

After you set up your chroots this way, you can list them with:

schroot -l

Note that you don't need sudo powers to use schroot and access the chroots.

You can "log in" a chroot with:

schroot -c name_of_chroot

which for the above settings example translates to:

schroot -c salix-14.1

and from then on, you're in a completely isolated environment, away from your day-to-day system, which you can use to build and test packages etc. You can use it for building any type of package this way, the only exception being kernel related packages (which can be done, but need extra effort). The default settings include using the same home dir in the chroot as you're normally using.

You can even run GUI apps in the chroot. So you can also use this to run 32bit apps in a 64bit system that you don't want to "contaminate" with multilib. You'll need to add the -p switch for that:

schroot -p -c salix-14.1

You can examine schroot options by taking a look in the man pages that come with it.