Debootstrap must be the most brilliant thing ever conceived

Are you lazy?
Are you tired of installing the same shit across Linux servers?
Are you sick of compiling the latest & greatest bag of mplayer/ffmpeg/lame on all your systems?
Are you becoming suicidal when someone asks you to send you a 'working out of the box version'?

You don't need to be :) Install once, run anywhere (on Linux ofcourse, but what else would you run anyway huh);

Install debootstrap;

apt-get install debootstrap

I personally find it nicest to have everything in a file (so you can easily copy one file and leave it at that);

First make a loopdevice (3 gb file);

dd if=/dev/zero of=/myETCH bs=1M count=3000

Set up kernel loopdevice if you didn't;

insmod loop.o

Set up the loop device;

losetup /dev/loop0 /myETCH

Format the loopdevice with ext3;

mkfs.ext3 /dev/loop0
mount /dev/loop0 /myETCH

then remove everything again;

umount /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0

Your loopdevice is now ready for use!

mount it with;

mount -t ext3 /myEtch /etchinstall -o loop=/dev/loop0

If you do not want a loopback device, simply run;

mkdir /etchinstall

After this you can proceed with installing Debian etch;

debootstrap etch /etchinstall

Wait for it to be done.

Then mount proc;

mount -t proc proc /etchinstall/proc

then you can chroot it;

chroot /etchinstall

And there you are; your own nice, contained version of Debian Etch.

Install whatever you want into it. Provide your friends with the loop file /myEtch when you want to have 100% the environment as you!