32-Bit Chroot How-To

[skylark]

Doh,

installation fails step1 for me:
$ sudo apt-get install dchroot debootstrap
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Package debootstrap is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package debootstrap has no installation candidate

I've got universe enabled in my /etc/apt/sources.list ... am I missing something?

Edit: Fixed it - I needed to uncomment more lines in my sources.list, sorry.

[lukus001]

I've been able to install 32bit firefox, realplayer etc.. via this chroot method, but realplayer lacks a lot of codecs...

is there anything "special" thing you need to do, to get the codecs running on to realplayer 32?

[skylark]

I managed to set this up, and have firefox, flash, totem-xine, and the java plugin working fine. My realplayer install sort of works but has major issues (lockups etc) when playing streams.

I think this chroot ideas is good - but what I would really like to do is set it up so that I dont have to share any partitions except maybe /dev with the chroot environment. That is - create a "chroot jail" where firefox and all the plugins reside. This would be really secure... only problem is I don't know how to get the Xwindows stuff working this way (I run into permission issues).

Anyone have any ideas?

[Red_Menace]

Anyone know of a guide that explains what all of this does, step by step? I'd like to know what I'm doing. I'm pretty green when it comes to linux.

[mizunoX]

I followed all of the instructions from the first post, then I installed firefox as per the second post.

My problem is that when I run firefox32 it loads the 64 bit version...
I tried removing both versions of firefox, the installing just the 32bit version with synaptic32. Guess what? When I load firefox32, it's still showing as the 64bit one!

Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

*edit* nevermind, it was the 32bit version. I was seeing AMD64 in help/about and it was throwing me off. Everything works perfectly, thanks for the how-to!

[joekr]

Does anyone know how I would be able to enable hardware acceleration within the chroot environment?

Please follow the link and help me out

[filemanager]

I'm just a little confused. Does this turn your amd64 system into a 32bit system, or does it allow you to install 32bit software *as well as* 64bit software?

Also, aside from firefox and that, how do you install other 32bit programs, just normally as their documentation says?

[ngolian]

I use this in /usr/local/bin/do_chroot :

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/dchroot -d "`echo $0 | sed 's|^.*/||'` `for i in "$@"; do echo -n '"'$i'" '; done`"

This way I can pass exotic characters in my command lines eg the brackets in Firefox's -remote command syntax and ampersands in URLs.

[Crad]

I'm just a little confused. Does this turn your amd64 system into a 32bit system, or does it allow you to install 32bit software *as well as* 64bit software?

Also, aside from firefox and that, how do you install other 32bit programs, just normally as their documentation says?

It allows you to have 32 bit binaries and libraries in your 64 bit system so you can execute programs that dont have well working 64-bit binaries, like say OOo.

[gordyt]

...
LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /home/mthaddon/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so [libXmu.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory]
...
Resolution:

Found out I needed to install libxmu6 - fixed the problem. Now have 32bit firefox version running nicely.

Tom thank you for posting this! I had just setup the chroot environment on my machine yesterday afternoon and was having the exact same problem.

Regards,
--gordon