You don’t need rawhide machine to test Fedora rawhide packages. In fact you don’t even need Fedora machine, any Linux distro should do.
First you’ll need YUM installed. It gets preinstalled on Fedora, but on other distros you’ll likely have to install it manually. I am running Debian, so I did:
apt-get install yum
On Fedora you can use DNF instead of YUM. I had to use YUM because DNF is not (yet) packaged for Debian.
You need to decide in which directory to install Eclipse. You’ll need
at least 1 GB free storage space. I chose /srv/eclipse-rawhide/.
Next step is creaing basic directory structure and mounting udev, sysfs and proc.
mkdir -p /srv/eclipse-rawhide/{dev,proc,sys,etc}
mount -B /dev /srv/eclipse-rawhide/dev
mount -B /sys /srv/eclipse-rawhide/sys
mount -B /proc /srv/eclipse-rawhide/proc
Now time to configure YUM. Default YUM settings will do for us, it’s only really necessary to define repos from which Eclipse should be installed. Besides standard rawhide repo I also added Koji YUM repo to have the most up-to-date packages available without having to wait for compose and mirror sync.
cat <<EOF >/srv/eclipse-rawhide/etc/yum.conf
[fedora-rawhide]
name=fedora-rawhide
baseurl=http://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/x86_64/os
[fedora-rawhide-koji]
name=fedora-rawhide-koji
baseurl=http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/repos/rawhide/latest/x86_64/
cost=2000
EOF
Lets install eclipse now. It’s done using (almost) standard YUM
command:
yum --installroot /srv/eclipse-rawhide install eclipse
This will download about 350 MB of packages. If you have an existing
YUM cache somewhere you can bind-mount it to
/srv/eclipse-rawhide/var/cache/yum to reduce download size. I was
to lazy to do that that and I needed a tee break anyways :)
Eclipse installed. We’re almost done. We can chroot in:
chroot /srv/eclipse-rawhide
Eclipse cannot run as root, so we have to create an unprivileged user and login as it.
adduser me
su me
We can run eclipse now.
eclipse
For me it didn’t work at first try because Eclipse couldn’t connect to
X server. I had to copy .Xauthority file into chroot and re-run
eclipse.
cp /home/kojan/.Xauthority /srv/eclipse-rawhide/home/me/
chroot /srv/eclipse-rawhide
chown me:me /home/me/.Xauthority
su me
eclipse
What normally do instead is bind-mount the whole home directory which
contains not only .Xauthority, but also all my git repos and Eclipse
workspaces. This works like a charm if you want to use rawhide
Eclipse for your normal work. For testing it may be better to just
copy required stuff into chroot.
By default Eclipse appearance may be quite ugly. You can improve it by installing some extra fonts and GTK theme of your choice.
yum --installroot /srv/eclipse-rawhide install @fonts gtk-nodoka-engine
ln -s /usr/share/themes/Nodoka/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /srv/eclipse-rawhide/home/me/.gtkrc-2.0
You can create a setuid-root script which will mount required stuff,
chroot to /srv/eclipse-rawhide and run Eclipse for you. I don’t use
any desktop environment, but if you do then you can even create
.desktop file to launch Eclipse more easily.
Now you have a complete Eclipse installation under
/srv/eclipse-rawhide. Updating it is just a matter of running YUM:
yum --installroot /srv/eclipse-rawhide update
Installing additional plugins is equally simple:
yum --installroot /srv/eclipse-rawhide install eclipse-m2e-core
This approach is faster and more lightweight than a VM (lower memory consumprion, no boot delays, no network latency, VNC overhead etc). It is also more stable than maintaining a VM (you are not affected by kernel, GRUB, Dracut or GNOME breakage). I’ve been successfully using this approach for 2 years. Happy testing rawhide Eclipse and other apps!