[Techtalk] chroot environment

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Gwen Morse <gwen.morse at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to set up a Playstation 2 emulator (http://pcsx2.net/) on linux
> (I already have it working on Windows). There is a linux build,
> however, it doesn't run on 64-bit systems.
>
> They suggest setting up a 32 bit chroot environment. My experience
> with chroot is exactly encompassed by typing it when using a livecd to
> fix something I've borked. I've never set one up.
>
> I'm on Fedora 13 using KDE and I've installed mock and installed the
> base 386 package for Fedora 12, as well as yum, gnome, and a few
> libraries the emulator needs. (it seemed easier to use different
> versions of everything to help keep it all straight). But, I don't
> really understand what the chroot environment *is*.

I'm not entirely sure you need a chroot. Can't you just install i586
versions of the libraries your app needs and run it? There's been some
work on allowing mixed installs like that to "just work", and I was
hoping fedora had gotten there already. Some googling seems to back
that up.

(For the record, a chroot changes where '/' points to, which is
important in this case because that also changes where libraries are
found for linking against. This way the linker can't try to link
against 64bit libraries for 32bit code, which would fail miserably.
But I think this is almost a solved problem now, allowing you to just
have 2 separate hierarchies of libraries, one for 32bit and one for
64bit).

cheers,
Wim