Today I’ve been investigating tools to let you have a full GNU/Linux distribution in your home directory, with no root access required. This is great when you can’t build software because your sysadmin has put standard libraries in non-standard locations, and messing with C_INCLUDE_PATH and friends is driving you crazy.

• proot
• junest (built on proot)
• fakechroot

Be sure to unset C_INCLUDE_PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH to avoid these being involved in builds inside the chroot.