I had a similar situation in testing, but finally got debirf to work inside a jessie chroot, with packages debirf and fakechroot upgraded from jessie-backports.
My working script follows : #!/bin/sh set -e MIRROR=http://httpredir.debian.org/debian CHROOTDIR=chroot DEBIRFDIR=/tmp/debirf SUUSER=nobody # prepare jessie chroot debootstrap jessie $CHROOTDIR $MIRROR # install debirf and fakechroot from jessie-backports echo deb $MIRROR jessie-backports main >$CHROOTDIR/etc/apt/sources.list.d/jessie-backports.list chroot $CHROOTDIR apt-get update chroot $CHROOTDIR apt-get -y -t jessie-backports install fakechroot debirf # debirf prepare chroot $CHROOTDIR chsh -s /bin/bash $SUUSER chroot $CHROOTDIR su -c "mkdir -p $DEBIRFDIR" $SUUSER chroot $CHROOTDIR su -c "tar xf /usr/share/doc/debirf/example-profiles/rescue.tgz -C $DEBIRFDIR" $SUUSER # debirf configure # debirf make DEBIRF_MIRROR=$MIRROR chroot $CHROOTDIR su -c "debirf make $DEBIRFDIR/rescue" $SUUSER ls -l $CHROOTDIR$DEBIRFDIR/rescue/vmlinuz* $CHROOTDIR$DEBIRFDIR/rescue/*cgz
