How to Setup an Alternative Linux Distro Chroot Under Ubuntu - Part 1

NOTE: This is part 1 of a 2 part series.

Developing a new server product requires me to test all sorts of things, including multiple distributions. As an Ubuntu developer, my main platform is, of course, Ubuntu.

It's a PITA to run multiple distributions from one system (and not very productive doing it from multiple machines), so I decided to setup chroots for each one. My production system has three environments outside of the main Ubuntu install: RHEL5, RHEL6 and SLES11.

Fortunately, Ubuntu has a nice tool called schroot. I like it because it's based off the original tool called dchroot, which I wrote back in 1999 (wow). It was mainly to allow people to use the UltraSPARC developer systems with more than one release of Debian without me having to setup multiple machines.

Fast forward 13 years, and now we have schroot. This tool has come a long way, and even includes support for snap shot of file systems so you can always start with a pristine environment. This is useful to me because I want to make sure when I build a package, only the required dependencies are installed, and I don't want to worry about screwing up the original environment. Not to mention, I can start more than one session and they wont bother each other.

In addition to schroot, we will need the rinse package. For anyone familiar with debootstrap, it's basically the same thing, but for RPM based systems. It will download and bootstrap all the required RPMs needed for a particular distro, in a manner suitable for a chroot environment.

sudo apt-get install schroot rinse

Now, if you look in /etc/rinse/rinse.conf, you will see several already configured RPM distributions. If you are wanting to do one for RHEL, you will need to either use CentOS instead, or duplicate the matching CentOS entry and rename, being sure to change the mirror URL to match your location. For my RHEL distros, I have a local RPM repository, so I use this entry:

[rhel-6]
mirror       = file:///srv/rhel6-ppc/RPMS/media/Packages

You will also need to copy the matching .packages file in /etc/rinse/ naming it the same as your entry.

Now decide where you want your chroot to be located. I've decided to put mine in /srv/chroots/rhel6-ppc. Create this directory, and then you can run the rinse command as follows:

sudo rinse --arch ppc --directory /srv/chroots/rhel6-ppc --distribution rhel-6

.

NOTE: I have my rinse script hacked a little to allow ppc as an arch. You will probably use i386 or amd64. Also, the --distribution argument is the same as the entry name.

In my next post, we'll move on to configuring schroot with a union type backing.