Last week I wanted to install Debian on a chroot on my machine. Maybe there is an easier way to do this, but I will document what I did, just in case someone wants to do something similar.

—

Debootstrap
is the recommended tool to install another system, as long as you have a Debian
system available. I don’t have a Debian system available right now. However I’ve
noticed that the debootstrap package has only a few dependencies. So I will try to extract
the package manually and run debootstrap on my Mandriva Cooker system.

I’ve download the deboostrap package and extracted it using ‘ar’:

$ ls
debootstrap_0.2.45-0.2_i386.deb
$ mkdir debootstrap
$ cd debootstrap
$ ar x ../debootstrap_0.2.45-0.2_i386.deb
$ ls
control.tar.gz  data.tar.gz  debian-binary
$

I’ve extracted the data contents from the package:

$ tar -zxvf data.tar.gz

First try to run the binary:

$ ./usr/sbin/debootstrap
./usr/sbin/debootstrap: line 15: /usr/lib/debootstrap/functions: No such file or directory

Oops, it needs to be installed on /.

I don’t want the files to be lost inside the filesystem, so I just added a symlink to the files I’ve extracted:

$ sudo ln -s /home/ehabkost/system/soft/justdownloaded/debootstrap/usr/lib/debootstrap /usr/lib/debootstrap

Let’s test again:

$ ./usr/sbin/debootstrap
I: usage: [OPTION]...   [ [

Great! :D

Now, let’s run it:

$ ./usr/sbin/debootstrap sarge /tmp/sarge

And it worked. :)

Quick and simple.