schroot Thursday Oct 3 9:22:41 2013 During this week I've spent some time looking for a script to create a chroot automatically, with minimal manual intervention. I found two very nice looking scripts but much to my surprise they both mentioned an incredibly handy tool called "schroot". At first I didn't give it much credit, there are so many programs out there and they are all so useful for some people, but it is not very likely that all software is useful for all people. Such is life! In the end I decided to give it a try. And guess what? It really left me stunned. Yeah, believe it or not I constantly use chroots for tests always as root, and as you can imagine, after all the testing is done, the chroots usually end up in a nearly unusable state. Then what I do is building another chroot, hence my quest for a script to automatize part of the process. Well, what "schroot" does is allowing you to enter a chroot without root privileges, and what is even better, all changes disappear after you leave the chroot (unless you want to keep the session open for a later time, or another day...) All you need to use schroot is a config file /etc/schroot/schroot.conf which can be really simple. Mine looks like this: [sid] description=Debian sid (unstable) directory=/sid users=chals The description line is optional, the directory is the location of the chroot and the users= field is your username. Then simply open a terminal and type: $ schroot -c sid And there you are. You are a regular user inside the chroot. Have fun!