Here I will not explain everything, I will tell you the command to use and the files to modify to be fast. All the steps described here are on an Ubuntu Hardy system.

First you need to install pbuilder :

sudo apt-get install pbuilder

Edit the pbuilder configuration file (/etc/pbuilderrc). The file is documented. The most interesting vars are :

BASETGZ
BUILDRESULT
BUILDPLACE
MIRRORSITE
COMPONENTS
APTCACHE

Copy the script in /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/pbuilder-distribution.sh to /usr/local/bin/pbuilder-intrepid

sudo cp /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/pbuilder-distribution.sh /usr/local/bin/pbuilder-intrepid

Then open the pbuilder script you just copied  :

sudo editor /usr/local/bin/pbuilder-intrepid

and set the following parameter to a path were you have enough space to host your chroot system :

BASE_DIR="/my/directory/pbuilder"

Then create your system, pbuilder will download the packages and tar.gz them:

pbuilder-intrepid create


That’s all, pbuilder is set up.  To login in you chrooted system, use

pbuilder-intrepid login

To exit, use :

exit