As opposed to some people, I prefer to use chroot rather than qemu ( or vmware, etc2, just name it) when doing my development, whenever possible. By this I don’t need to worry about damaging my system, and not having to deal with overheads introduced by virtualisation.

What I use for the purpose are my 40GB removable harddisk, and gentoo’s stage3 install package. Here’s how it goes;
shakir@herugrim ~ $ cat temp/bin/xxusbhd

#!/bin/bash
MOUNT=/mnt/usbhd

sudo mkdir $MOUNT

sudo mount -t reiserfs -o exec,rw /dev/`cat /proc/partitions | grep 39069680 | gawk ‘{ print $4 }’` $MOUNT

shakir@herugrim ~ $ temp/bin/xxusbhd
shakir@herugrim ~ $ cd /mnt/usbhd/chroot/uclinux/
shakir@herugrim /mnt/usbhd/chroot/uclinux $ cat /home/shakir/temp/bin/xxchroot.gentoo
#!/bin/bash

sudo mkdir -p usr/portage/distfiles
sudo mount –bind /usr/portage usr/portage
sudo mount –bind /home/gentoo/distfiles/ usr/portage/distfiles
sudo mount –bind /dev dev/
sudo mount –bind /proc proc/
sudo chroot . /bin/bash

sudo umount dev/
sudo umount proc/
sudo umount usr/portage/distfiles/
sudo umount usr/portage/

## Second check
echo "## Second check.. Please ignore the errors"
sudo umount dev/
sudo umount proc/
sudo umount usr/portage/distfiles/
sudo umount usr/portage/

shakir@herugrim /mnt/usbhd/chroot/uclinux $ /home/shakir/temp/bin/xxchroot.gentoo
herugrim / # ls -l
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  3464 Aug  3 15:39 bin
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    96 Aug  3 14:24 boot
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 13280 Nov 28 08:37 dev
drwxr-xr-x 30 root root  2336 Nov 28 08:18 etc
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    72 Aug  3 14:23 home
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root  3736 Nov 10 11:45 lib
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root   120 Aug  3 14:23 mnt
-rw-r–r–  1 root root     0 Nov 14 12:57 modules.dep
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    72 Aug  3 14:23 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 79 root root     0 Nov 28 08:36 proc
drwx——  2 root root    72 Aug  3 15:39 root
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  3344 Aug  3 15:39 sbin
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    72 Aug  3 14:23 sys
drwxrwxrwt  2 root root    80 Nov 28 08:18 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root   744 Nov 28 08:18 uClinux-dist
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root   368 Nov  9 12:17 usr
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root   288 Aug  3 15:38 var
herugrim / # exit
exit
## Second check.. Please ignore the errors
umount: dev/: not mounted
umount: proc/: not mounted
umount: usr/portage/distfiles/: not mounted
umount: usr/portage/: not mounted
shakir@herugrim /mnt/usbhd/chroot/uclinux $ cd
shakir@herugrim ~ $ cat temp/bin/xxusbhd.clean
#!/bin/bash

MOUNT=/mnt/usbhd

sudo umount $MOUNT
sudo rmdir $MOUNT

shakir@herugrim ~ $ /home/shakir/temp/bin/xxusbhd.clean
shakir@herugrim ~ $ ls /mnt/
cdrom  cf  floppy  sdb1  sdc1  thumb  windoze
shakir@herugrim ~ $

Terminal’s output copy-paste is a lazy but definitive way of explaining this (stress on the later ).. /home/shakir/temp/bin is actually already in my path, and so I just need to type my script’s name to execute it (please refer to my previous post).