There is also a tutorial of sorts for this board of installing a base fedora, doing a rm -rf of the mounted root, and a debootstrap into the root to convert it to Debian by force.

As much as I like UOS, it appears to be for government and military only. Sad, it’s really nice though

Instead of running chroot directly, schroot is a tool that wraps it and offers nice things like an fstab-like file which says which host filesystems should be mounted inside the chroot (so you can have your home directory in there), hook scripts, etc. With what I seem to recall is the default setup, I find I don’t need to run xauth, just tell it to pass through environment variables using the -p option, because processes inside the chroot will be able to find the X server’s socket. I had to do a tiny bit of extra configuration to get sound working in the chroot though.

Another interesting tool is rinse. It’s like debootstrap, but instead of installing a Debian-like distribution into a directory, it installs an RPM-based one. If you’re already on an RPM-based distribution it’s not all that useful though since the rpm and yum commands have chroot support built-in.