Debian AMD64 chroot questions

[Arnaud_B]

Hi,

I just finished set up my new Debian amd64 and I am about to set up a chroot. But before starting I would like to have some info about it.

1/ Will the x86 apps inside the chroot be able to call apps in the 64bits OS. ex: if I click on an email address in Firefox (x86) can it open a Kmail window (amd64)?

2/ Are the fonts of the 64 bits OS available to apps within the chroot or do I need to have a separate set of fonts within the chroot?

3/ I am using kde and if I install firefox inside the chroot will I have to reinstall gtk-qt-engine or my present configuration will affect apps within the chroot?

4/ Is there any negative performance impact in using a chroot? ex: will firefox be as responsive inside the chroot than it is outside?

5/ Is it easy to remove a chroot? The idea would be to use it for now and get rid of it once the apps I need exist in 64bits...

6/ Also I would be interested in knowing any problems you might have encountered in using a chroot... thanks

7/ Also I saw that usually people install a chroot in /var... I'm sure this is a very sensible thing to do but I was wondering what was the reason for this, I would have though that for a small number of apps like mine I could just put it in my /home.

In brief, the 32bits apps I need are fairly limited but not having them is kind of annoying. There are mplayer with w32codecs, skype, flash, and maybe acrobat. Actually among those I mostly want flash (yea the add-plugin but it's everywhere now ) and skype, w32codecs I'm not really sure... my use of mplayer is kind of limited to real streams, quicktime stuff and maybe couple windows media files (rare I guess), do you know if I really *need* w32codecs for these cases?

Well also I heard about other methods besides the chroot but I have to admit that I don't know much about them so if you have an opinion about nspluginwrapper and gnash (does it finally work in youtube by the way?) for instance I would be interested

In brief, I just want something clean, stable, integrated, upgradeable and without --force-arch type of thing

Thanks in advance for your help!

A.

[mahlerfan]

If you want desktop integration, the old school chroot jail approach will give you headaches.

I suggest keeping the 64 bit firefox, and using ndiswrapper to handle the plugins.