[Salix-main] Merry Christmas! (and a little present)

[George V. <vla...@gm...>]

Merry Christmas everyone!

I wish everyone the best, may you experience lots of love, joy and 
laughter with your loved ones this Christmas!

And here's a very small thing I worked on which will probably help 
packagers, but may also be of use for regular users too...

I was thinking that we should have an easy way to install and use Salix in 
a chroot. So I came up with a small script which you can now install in 
Salix 14.1 with:

sudo spi -i salix-chroot-install

after that, you will be able to install salix anywhere (for example in 
a directory in your /home) with it. You'll need to specify a salix iso and 
the destination directory, like:

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

you 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 is available through 
SBo, so:

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

and if you're installing a 32bit chroot in a 64bit host and want to run 
GUI apps, you'll also need to run:

sudo update-all

or fonts will come up as garbage.

Well, that's it for the most part. You can examine schroot options by 
taking a look in the man pages that come with it. This is a (very) 
lightweight alternative to docker, linux containers and similar stuff, but 
for building/testing packages and running apps in the chroot it covers all 
that's needed. It's like virtualization without the virtualization part. :D

I'll probably write a wiki page for this one of these days...

Hope this is of some use.

Once again, Merry Christmas everyone!

George