This is the first public release, under GPLv3. The software is now in a state where I can use it every day to maintain chroots. To download the source code, use the link below. There is also a git repository available for cloning. Chroots is developed under Ubuntu, and can build debian and Ubuntu chroots through deboostrap.

Source Code: chroots-0.2.tar.gz
Git Repository: http://git.digitalself.org/?p=chroots.git

If anyone finds this useful, don’t hesitate to drop a comment with suggestions or feedback. I’m looking forward to it. Bug reports are nice, and will be handled. More information about chroots below, and inside the source package. In time, I might put up a page for the project. In the meantime, enjoy this release.

About Chroots

Chroots is a set of wrapper scripts around  debootstrap. debootstrap is an effective way of create a general purpose build environment. While it is fairly simple to setup a working environment, it’s always necessary to perform several steps to actually login into a deboostrapped environment using chroot. It can be a cumbersome task, hence chroots.

For test building packages there is already pbuilder. What pbuilder does is build a debian package in a freshly created chroot environment. This allows detecting build and dependency errors quite effectively. Nevertheless, to use pbuilder, an environment is setup every time and out of the user’s reach, and it is quite a difficult tool to use for the occasional packaging experiment.

This is where chroots comes in. It allows to easily configure setup and deploy a chroot environment, enabling everything from package tests to dependency check, or manual tarball compilation, keeping your production environment ‘clean’. It allows to maintain several chroot environments at the same time, so that it can be easy to test multiple systems.

The Ubuntu Hardy Heron is upon us. It was released last week. I have already been using it for over a month now, all the way back to the first beta releases, and I can say it’s a well polished release, with some new features and usable by beauty and geek alike. For the first time, suspend really works on my laptop (even with a proprietary graphics driver) and that is something to celebrate. Maybe we could have an Ubuntu Release Party next time ?

But, there is a downside to this release: Firefox 3.0 beta 5 is still quite unstable, with several bugs, and particularly bad Flash support. Bug #192888 is particularly nasty and annoying, since you have to trade crashes for lack of sound within flash animations. If you need to use Firefox 3.0, then hold off on the update for a couple of days until an update comes down the apt pipe . Beyond that, another great release by the Ubuntu team.

(Foto by suneko posted at Flickr, shared under a Creative Commons License.)