elstel.org

xchroot has a new feature: It can mirror mounts into the root as well as out of the root while a chroot is in progress. This is achieved by forking a mirror-mountd process. Furthermore the code has been cleaned up to allow faster unmounts on exit, prettier printing with three message levels and an effective polling whether a sub-process has terminated on exit. Mounting the home directory into the root can now be done with a simple command line switch. As there have been done some bigger changes to xchroot, further testing is welcome.

Bugfix for xchroot: Under certain conditions directories were not unmounted correctly when leaving the chroot. A possible hang when invoking cleanup later on has also been resolved. No more spurious error message on chroot to relative directory. When already inside the directory of the chroot the directory is kept on chrooting.

xchroot has been furnished with many new features:

• pulseaudio support
• running programs directly with xchroot without additionally specifying the chroot root directory (fetched from sudoers)
• program parameters with quotes and spaces are passed on correctly
• create desktop files for applications inside the chroot to run them with file associations and the GUI starter menu of the host system
• current working directory is preserved if it exists inside the chroot

Some improvements to xchroot have been realised: a better working --quiet switch, making use of chroot --userspec to avoid su and sudo inside the chroot and a --genuine-retval switch to directly return the return code of chroot / the program inside the chroot.

some tiny fixes for xchroot-v2.3.3: corrected group management: xchroot as user may have failed without these fixes; note: released under the same upstream version i.e. 2.3.3 (only package revision has changed).