chroot to Debian based file system on USB/SD for native development

Although the desktop offer much faster speed for program development sometimes cross compiling can be cumbersome. A USB/SD based native development environment can offer convenience for small to medium application development.

The Glomation SBC can be configured to boot to the file system installed on the USB or SD but it requires change of the U-boot boot environment setting. The chroot method offers easy switch over from the embedded file system to a Debian file system without needing the change of any of the system settings.

First prepare the USB/SD storage by make an ext2/3 file system using mkfs.ext2/mkfs.ext3 command, for example
mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1.

Boot the SBC with the embedded file system with USB/SD inserted.

Mount the USB/SD to /mnt directory
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
or
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt

Then untar the Debian file system available at http://www.glomationinc.com/download/debian-etch-arm-base.tar.gz to the USB/SD.
cd /mnt
wget http://www.glomationinc.com/download/debian-etch-arm-base.tar.gz
tar zxf debian-etch-arm-base.tar.gz

Create a chroot proc directory in /mnt if it does not exist
mkdir -p /mnt/proc

The above steps only need to be done once to prepare the USB/SD storage.

To chroot to the Debian file system on USB/SD
mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc
chroot /mnt /bin/sh

Do development, testing, etc

After leaving the chroot env:
umount /mnt/proc