Secondary linux dist WITHIN primary one

Linux and Unix-Like Linux
1

Hi

New here so forgive my ignorance and inability to express myself in an informative manner :wink:

I have a Fedora distribution installed on my development computer. The system we build is meant to run on a slackware dist which is all fine and well. But due to our flow of deployment I would have to create a new tag in svn each time I would like one of our slackware servers to build the system, even for testing minor fixes. This will ofcourse create an enormous ammount of tags if this approach were to be used. My predecessor apperently managed to get a secondare ROOT in his system in which he had a slackware distribution installed. He had it placed in a folder in /32 and changed to it just by typing "32" in the terminal. Does ANYONE have an idea of how this is accomplished? Beacuse then I would be able to switch to that environment, compile and test locally without having to ditch my entire Fedora installation.
He didn't quite remember himself how he got it working but he said that I could try to install slackware on a usb and just copy the entire thing to a folder in my Fedora installation after that. But to me it seems like the system somehow would have to read a lot of env variables etc from the slackware dist when I change and I don't get how to get that to work at all. I have been using Linux on and off for quite a few years, but I don't know the ins and outs of how everything works, so please explain in a kindergarten way if you can :wink:

Thanx in advance!

2

Without further info, I can think of 2 ways he could have done that: User-mode Linux or a chroot environment.

Or you can build yourself a small Slackware VM using qemu/VirtualBox/VMware/Xen/KVM/...

3

Sounds to me like he was just chroot-ing. It runs a new shell that thinks /path/to/fedora/files is / . This means it'll load programs and libraries from inside there and nowhere else. It's a good way to test programs but doesn't actually boot it... UML would be closer but it's a kernel, not a flat-out virtual machine like vmware -- it doesn't emulate a computer screen for you or anything.