How to create a Debian install inside a chroot with Debootstrab
debootstrap –arch i386 lenny $CHROOTDIR http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian
debootstrap lenny|testing|unstable
Remember you can use release name (lenny) or type testing; the important difference is that if you use, say, squeeze, which is now testing, when it becomes stable, you stay on squeeze; if you use testing, you stay on testing even when squezee is released. –arch can be omitted ftp.us.debian.org if not set it’s the default setting
Configure the chroot
First, mount the /proc filesystem.
mount -t proc proc $CHROOTDIR/proc
mount -t devpts devpts $CHROOTDIR/dev/pts # Don’t worry if this doesn’t work
for you.
Enter the chroot
LANG=C chroot $CHROOTDIR/ /bin/bash
The LANG it’s important to avoid errors with programs that require setting locales, if you wish you can do apt-get install locales o dpkg-reconfigure locales.
Important to not confuse chroot with normal system
export PS1=»CHROOT:\w# »
Also you can create
/etc/debian_chroot
and put something like «lenny» and when do chroot that adds to the prompt.
Commands to configure the chroot
You only run them once.
cd /dev; /sbin/MAKEDEV generic; cd –
To prevent problems with locales entering the chroot
LANG=C chroot $CHROOTDIR /bin/bash
Sometimes MAKEDEV will fail from inside chroot you can do outside the chroot as root
Also sometimes debotstrab forgot to get the signing key for the archive-repositories, most of times doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade fixes it, if not you need to install debian-archive-keyring.
At the end one can free space with apt-get clean and with deborphan.
Its good idea to umount $CHROOTDIR/proc and $CHROOTDIR/dev/ when shutting down the machine.
