Gentoo Testing within Gentoo Stable

[flickerfly]

This will step you through the process of setting up a system within your system. It's really very simple and will give you a digital playground for messing with things and helping people withot borking your own system. You could also setup one to run ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arch".

Thanks to Magnet for already doing this and dropping the idea on me. I'm just sharing.

REQUIREMENTS:
1) You will need to perform almost all these commands as root. Go ahead and su in now.
2) Also get the stage3 tarball. Just copy it out to /tmp. Here's the x86 one: stage3-x86-1.4_rc3.tar.bz2

NOTE: You may already have it on cd or an iso that you can mount.
mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop /home/jritchie/Downloads/gentoo-3stages-x86-1.4_rc3.iso /mnt/iso
will mount the iso (assuming other things). You can find the tarballs in the /mnt/iso/gentoo directory.

DIRECTIONS:
1) type mkdir /opt/testsys
(You can put this elsewhere if you desire. Just change it throughout the directions)
2) tar jxvf /tmp/stage3-x86-1.4_rc3.tar.bz2 /opt/testsys
3) Modify this script and make it executable, then run it.
(I suggest using the /root/bin directory. You will need to su in to get to it each time anyway. As long as ~/bin is in your path you could su -c "testin".)


Code:

#!/bin/bash #A Little Script(tm) to get into my test system #This script should be named "testin" #It should be real easy to customize # Set Variables (This should be all you really need to edit to start.) NROOT=/opt/testsys #Test System Directory NAME=TestSys #Test System's Name (whatever you want) GREET=1 #1 indicates greeting, 0 indicates no greeting #Move proper config files - Add/Remove as you desire # #You may be able to link instead of copy each time, but be #aware of the possibility of overwriting your real config files cp /etc/resolv.conf $NROOT/etc/resolv.conf cp /etc/fstab $NROOT/etc/fstab cp /etc/mtab $NROOT/etc/mtab cp /etc/hosts $NROOT/etc/hosts #Mount proper filesystems #You could mount CDs, NFS dirs or other things automatically if you care to. mount -t proc /proc $NROOT/proc 2&>1 > /dev/null #Login cd $NROOT if [ $GREET -eq 1 ] then         echo "$USER, Welcome to $NAME in $NROOT" fi chroot $NROOT /bin/bash



4) You should now be in your test system. All that's left if an update.
Type: emerge sync ; emerge -vup world
5) Type: emerge -u world
6) To get out of this sytem type exit or C^d (equivalents)
7) Anytime you want to get in run the script above

If you see error above, pm me and I'll gladly adjust as needed.

I'd greatly enjoy hearing others suggestions for improvement. I imagine those with more time could easily setup several different versions of this on one computer (assuming hd space) and modify it easily to go to certain installs. Maybe add a command line argument to my script so that you can type in the name and it will change the directory or something like that. That's beyond my need, but it is easily doable and I'm sure someone already does.

Still a Mystery (or) Enhancements Yet to Be
For you fluxbox/aterm users, this is something I'm trying to figure this out:
I have this in my ~/.fluxbox/menu

[magnet]

hehe thanks undernet's #gentoo for the help.
_________________
every step aim at glory.