Chroot and Linux from Scratch

Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 7:00PM in Dreese 264 (note the change in location), Daniel Thau will be giving a dual presentation covering the chroot operation as well as the Linux From Scratch project.

Chroot, available on all major Unix-y systems, changes the root directory from the point of a selected program and its children. Effectively, this is somewhat akin to vitalization (with a number of comparative benefits and deficiencies relative to actual vitalization). Some uses of chroot include the creation of a testing environment, a separated environment for compatibility reasons, limited privilege separation, and recovery of unbootable or otherwise hampered systems. While chroot is available on other Unix-y systems, the presentation will focus on it’s uses with Linux distributions.

The other topic, Linux From Scratch, is a collection of documentation which walks a user through the processes of creating a functional Linux distribution. While the base LFS system is fairly minimal, LFS has sister projects (such as Beyond Linux From Scratch) which allow a LFS-based system to (after a lot of work) fit the needs of almost any type of Linux distribution, from an extremely minimal embedded system to a fully featured desktop or server. More important, perhaps, is the fact that working through the LFS documentation is a great way to learn about the innards of a Linux system.