When /home is mounted by schroot, all configuration files are placed in $HOME of the base install, irrespective of whether they belong to the schroot.
This can lead to configuration files being overwritten when two versions of a package are installed, one in the base install and the other in the schroot.
It's easy to alter the schroot setup so that its configuration files are placed in a different directory, as shown in the following example.
A schroot for wheezy-amd64 is located in /var/schroot/wheezy-amd64. This particular schroot is using the 'desktop' profile, hence its mount points are defined in /etc/schroot/desktop/fstab.
First, create a home directory for the user inside the schroot,
mkdir /var/schroot/wheezy-amd64/home/$USERNAME
Second, replace the following line in /etc/schroot/desktop/fstab,
/home /home none rw,bind 0 0
with,
/home /HOME none rw,bind 0 0
That's all! It's also convenient to add an alias to ~/.bash_aliases in the base install,
alias wheezy64='schroot -c wheezy-amd64 `/bin/echo "-d $PWD" | /bin/grep "^-d[ ]*\/home" | sed "s/home/HOME/"`'
Inside the schroot, the user now sees two home directories:
- /home/$USERNAME is the schroot home directory.
- /HOME/$USERNAME is the home directory of the base install.
Best Answer
By default,
schrootmount directories according to filesystem table file/etc/schroot/default/fstab. You could comment the line start with/homeso that schroot won't bind-mount the home directory.You could also specify other filesystem table file by editing schroot conf file. For example, if you add
setup.fstab=minimal/fstabto the end of/etc/schroot/chrood.d/[your chroot's].conf, schroot would filesystem according to/etc/schroot/minimal/fstab.