Stable Gentoo Chroot

December 20, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo

Recently I joined Gentoo AMD64 team. I always wanted to become an archer and bring the stable branch in a more sane condition. Fortunately, amd64 members are already doing an amazing work, and amd64 stable branch is in a pretty well state. So how do I plan to do the keywording and stabilization?

I am going to use two different ways. First, I will use my old Athlon AMD64 single core / 1,5GB@333Mhz of RAM as a stable platform to do the stabilizations of small packages. This is a quite old CPU so I can’t do much there. On the other hand, I owe a new Phenom X3 machine with 2GB@800Mhz of RAM. However, this machine is running testing Gentoo with plenty of masked packages as well ^_^

So the only choice I had to take advantage of this is to build a stable chroot :)

Those are the steps I followed :) ( Might be wrong, but hey, they worked for me :p )

————————————————————————————

1 ) mkdir /mnt/gentoo-stable

2 ) Download the latest autobuild from your preferred mirror.

    wget http://files.gentoo.gr/releases/amd64/autobuilds/current-stage3/

3 ) mv stage3-amd64-20091217.tar.bz2 /mnt/gentoo-stable

4 ) cd /mnt/gentoo-stable && tar xvjpf stage3-amd64-20091217.tar.bz2

5 ) cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo-stable/etc && cp -L /etc/passwd /mnt/gentoo-stable/etc && cp -L /etc/shadow /mnt/gentoo-stable/etc
6 ) Adjusted my make.conf
7 ) Created a custom init script for the host machine
8 ) rc-update add gentoo-stable on my host machine
9 ) Done

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Now all you need to do is to run

chroot /mnt/gentoo-stable /bin/bash && source /etc/profile && env-update

See? It wont take more than 5′ to have a brand new stable Gentoo :)

ps: As you may have notitced, I am binding my cvs checkout of portage to /mnt/gentoo-stable/usr/portage. This means that the chroot is using my cvs portage to build the packages. Of course, you can always bind your rsync clone of portage by using/

mount -o bind /usr/portage /mn/gentoo/usr/portage  :)

Trivial procedure but I had to mention it :)

Disclaimer: I used 32bit chroot guide from Gentoo docs as a tutorial reference :)

Tags: amd64, chroot, Gentoo, stable

Comments

3 Responses to “Stable Gentoo Chroot”

Kevin Bowling on December 20th, 2009 2:24 pm

Cool! I will try setting up a stable i686 chroot to build packages for my servers.
Nathan Zachary on December 20th, 2009 9:03 pm

Very neat way to run a stable machine essentially inside of a testing-branch machine. I just wanted to let you know that there is one very slight typo I noticed. Right near the end of your post, you have:

mount -o bind /usr/portage /mn/gentoo/usr/portage

and it is missing the t in mnt:

mount -o bind /usr/portage /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage

I would assume, but I have been wrong before (many times). :p

Thanks again for the nice write-up.
–Zach
Vasilis on December 20th, 2009 11:01 pm

Excellent information Markos! Mpravo!

Sometime during the summer and after feeling bored for a while, I contacted one of the leads of the AMD64 arch test team to find out what I can do to become one arch tester. He sent me information, however the time passed and never actually did something more. I wish I had more time to help with that.

Good luck!