Install debian from debian
 

I'm running debian etch and its going fine, but I would like to give KDE4 a try. Since I don't want to make a mess of anything I will be installing a seprate etch just for KDE4, and I was wandering if rather than booting the CD I could run the installer without logging out of my current Debian.

Since I would be suprised if I don't end up installing debian several times after varous mishaps it would be nice if I didn't have to reboot every time I want to wipe and reinstall my KDE4 test partition

Why not just run it in qemu or something like vmplayer? That way if you mess something up the original image is fine no need to reinstall.

Just curious where are you planning on getting KDE4, the newest I know of is the snapshot of 3.80.2.

If you haven't already you may want to take a look at:
"Builds KDE from its Subversion source repository."
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=23840

If you are following the directions from here:
KDE Developer's Corner - KDE Trunk
http://developer.kde.org/build/trunk.html

You "should" be safe enough just building/installing it on your working system.

Virtualiseation is slower than running native.

Thanks for the builder app btw :)

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/re...h-tips.en.html
See the chapter 8.6.35

This is why I love linux! you can do anything with it.

thanks for the link :)

By the way, from the chroot, you can connect to your X window outside the chroot so you don't have to run 2 X-servers. Just use display :1 for the chroot.
For this, you will need to have the correct X MIT token.
One way to do this is to also mount /home with bind (or rbind) option of mount. So that /chroot/home is in fact /home.
Take care then to not do a rm -rf /chroot, you will loose your /chroot/home, /home in other words.
Another way if you are in a single user environment is to disable X security by using X -ac . Be sure that X is not exported to the outside world (by default its not listening under debian so no risk)