Liam O'Toole wrote:
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:43:24 -0300 Cassiano Leal <cleal@via-rs.net> wrote:Tarek Soliman wrote:Really? I didn't know that. What are the basic steps to do it? I was really eager to try sid, but didn't want to break my etch and have to reinstall everything!An even nicer thing is that you can run sid in a chroot and "try before you upgrade" if you have enough space on a partition.Cheers CassianoI did this yesterday, and found it really easy. Just install the debootstrap package at see the example near the end of the debootstrap man page.
You could also use an x86 emulation package (I use qemu, but bochs should also work, and there's always vmWare if you want to spend cash, or one of the hypervisor systems - Xen is such, I think).
In the case of qemu, you build a 'disk image' file in any location with enough disk space, you don't need a free partition. A further advantage is the ability to take a 'snapshot' of the installation, before making changes of any sort, then experiment, and then revert back to the snapshot, to try alternatives. No reinstalls, no 'cruft' from the experiments, just a nice, clean environment to start over with. And if you find something you missed in the initial install/setup, add it and commit the change to the image to preserve it.
Since it runs 'under' your booted OS, no reboot, no chroot, no switching, just another application running in its own window.
The down side is, of course, the slowdown due to the 'emulation', but with x86 on top of x86, qemu provides an 'accelerator' that passes x86 code straight to the real processor, bypassing the emulation code where it can and helping to speed things up. But a fast processor is really needed to make this work.
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