I want to run a virtual machine in my Ubuntu desktop that runs a Debian server.

The purpose of this is to generate Debian packages. I have some C++ applications that were originally developed on my Ubuntu machine, and I need to (re)compile them on a Debian server in order to:

• build Deb packages for deployment on a Debian server
• make sure that the applications will definitely work on a debian server

The idea is so that I can do 90% of my development on Ubuntu (where I am more comfortable), and deploy a binary package that definitely works on Debian.

BTW, I am developing on Karmic Kola (Ubuntu 9.10).

[Edit]

Following the advice I got so far, I have installed debootstrap and Debian 'Lenny' on /srv/chroot/debian_lenny on my machine. I am not sure this is the server version, but in any case I dont think that matters for my purposes (though it would be useful to know how to specifically install the server version).

At the moment though, I am like a fish out of water, since there is no GUI, and it is only a console that I have in the chroot jail. I had a look in the home folder (I cheated, by using the KNavigator in Ubuntu), and there are no folders there - which presumably mean that no users have been set up as yet in the Debian "system".

I would like to know how to do the following:

1. Download and install the dev tools needed for (re)compiling my C++ apps
2. Copy my projects from the Ubuntu "system" to the Debian "system"
3. After building the binaries, I would like to create a debian binary package containing all of my binaries, so that I can install the package on a Debian server (my remote server)