Foreign Environments a-la Scratchbox

[codedot]

The following steps are to create foreign architecture schroot(1) environments similar to those in Scratchbox. The example is for Debian-based x86 host and little-endian ARM target. The resulting emulated environment will make use of Qemu as an interpreter for non-native binaries (see /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc Linux kernel facility).

1. Install the qemu-user-static package which automatically registers Qemu interpreters for binaries of architectures supported by Qemu, including ARM.
2. Copy /usr/bin/qemu-static-arm into /new/chroot/dir/usr/bin.
3. Run debootstrap --arch=arm etch /new/chroot/dir http://archive.debian.org/debian.
4. Append the following paragraph to /etc/schroot/schroot.conf for the new environment:
   

   [arm]
   type=directory
   directory=/new/chroot/dir

5. Check the resulting environment:
   

   alexo@codedot:~$ schroot -c arm
   (arm)alexo@codedot:~$ uname -srm
   Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 armv5tel
   (arm)alexo@codedot:~$