I am looking to be able to set up a development environment.
Here's the deal, I prefer to run arch as my operating system but I also maintain packages for an ubuntu based distro and I was wondering if there was a way to set up an environment from within arch to accomplish this. I would like to do it without dual booting and without the need for virtualbox.
Is this possible? Is it something I can possibly use a local docker instance for? A minimal chroot? Any help is appreciated.
On Arch you can use debootstrap to set up Debian or Ubuntu chroots. It's as easy as
debootstrap jessie ./jessie-chroot http://httpredir.debian.org/debian
(to set up a Jessie chroot; Ubuntu variants are similar).
You can also deploy the Open Build Service locally and use that to build for all the main distributions. That's a bit more complicated though...
Use schroot to run the other distribution in a chroot. A chroot lets you run programs with the paths that they expect, on the kernel that you're already running. The schroot program helps set up a chroot which is created on demand and has access to home directories, /proc, etc. Running other distributions or other distribution versions is what it's for.
To install Ubuntu or other Debian-based distributions in a chroot, use debootstrap.
For more details, see How do I run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit Debian/Ubuntu? which is also largely applicable when the host is another Linux distribution.
