The following is taken from an e-mail Sneakums sent to lnx-bbc-devel. We now use this mechanism to produce the release candidate and final release ISOs of the LNX-BBC. Please send us feedback on lnx-bbc-devel!
I just completed a test build of the LNX-BBC in a Debian chroot, which yielded an ISO that looks about the right size. A copy of this chroot is at http://zork.net/~sneakums/Debian-3.0r1.tar.bz2; it's about 34M compressed, 125M uncompressed, and contains all of the packages I have found necessary to complete a build (for reference: the Debian base system, plus build-essential, rsync, wget, bison, flex, texinfo, gettext, unzip, bzip2, ccache and bin86).
Packages not essential to the build, such as cvs, have been omitted. If you wish to use cvs inside the chroot, simply run "apt-get install cvs" as root once you have logged in as outlined below.
Using the chroot is fairly straightforward, although I should really wrap some of this up in a script for convenience.
I do my builds under my own account using a tree and garchive in my homedir, so the way I use the chroot reflects this. If your garchive is elsewhere, it's just one extra step to have it visible in the chroot, so that is no great obstacle. Note that you need to be running on Linux 2.4, for the "mount --bind" stuff. You also need to have root; any command below that has the "#" prompt before it must be run as root. This is especially important for the unpacking of the chroot, since otherwise device nodes will not be created and the permissions will be all wrong.
# tar xfj Debian-3.0r1.tar.bz2 # chroot Debian-3.0r1 /bin/bash # mount -t proc proc /proc # mount -t devpts devpts /dev/pts
Note that the bz2 option for your tar may be I or --bzip2 instead of j. You may also wish to run bunzip2 on the tarball manually.
You should now add a user to the chroot whose name, UID and homedir are the same as the your user on the host system. For example, on my machines, my username is "sneakums" and my UID is 1000, so I do the following:
# groupadd -g 1000 sneakums # useradd -u 1000 -g 1000 sneakums # mkdir /home/sneakums
(You don't need to worry about the permissions on the homedir.)
You should configure /etc/resolv.conf at this point, unless you do not need network access inside the chroot. Copying the /etc/resolv.conf from the host system should suffice.
From outside the chroot, bind your home directory into the chroot, like so:
# mount --bind /home/sneakums /home/sneakums/chroots/Debian-3.0r1/home/sneakums
# su - sneakums
And you now are ready to build.
Any additional directories you need to have available inside the chroot can simply be bound as above, for example, if you have a system-wide garchive, from outside the chroot just do:
# mkdir -p /home/sneakums/chroots/Debian-3.0r1/var/cache/gar/garchive
# mount --bind /var/cache/gar/garchive \
/home/sneakums/chroots/Debian-3.0r1/var/cache/gar/garchive
The chroot has ccache installed. Debian's ccache package installs a set of symlinks in /usr/lib/ccache, so all you need to do before starting a build is set CCACHE_DIR and then do:
export PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH
Log out of your user shell, and then umount /dev/pts and /proc. You can exit the root shell and umount the bindings you made above, and things should be as they were.
/ | [|] Sean Neakums | Questions are a burden to others; [|] <sneakums@zork.net> | answers a prison for oneself. \ |