Our group has some machines running the old Red Hat Linux 7.3. The system is too old, but I didn't want to wipe off the disk to install a new system. Since I have root access on them, I decided to install the Debian system in a chrooted environment.
This is how I did it:
sudo -s
cd /tmp
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.8_all.deb
ar -x debootstrap_1.0.8_all.deb
cd /
zcat /tmp/data.tar.gz |tar xv
debootstrap --arch i386 sid /debian
mount -t devpts devpts /debian/dev/pts
mount -t tmpfs shm /debian/dev/shm
mount -t proc proc /debian/proc
mount --bind /dev /debian/dev
LC_ALL=C chroot /debian/