Running New Software on an Old System

I have a netbook which still runs a very old system. It's ancient and no longer supported (just like Windows XP). But it's the last version which supports the proprietary Intel Graphics drivers (poulsbo) with video acceleration in Linux. Now the problem is using this in any environment would be extremely dangerous, because it's full of years of serious security issues. And the software really is very ancient.

Luckily, there is help, called schroot. Using a simple script, you can replace any command with a command out of the chroot. With this simple script, the application will behave just as if it was installed in your current environment - except for access to directories.

#!/bin/bash
schroot -c precise -- /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable ${@}

Of course you could just the same method to simple make your system a bit more secure for a few programs. You can use schroot and debootstrap to setup a secure environment.