Bad news: No, this type of thing does not exist as a nice package.

Good news: rolling your own isn't to hard.

You can use user mode Linux (UML) to test a system configuration/etc (of
course you can't fully test hardware issues, but it will let you test the
software/etc).

You could use vmware to test a system configuration/etc (of course you can't
fully test hardware issues, but it will let you test the software/etc).

You can setup extra partitions, i.e. /var2, /usr2, /etc2, whatever and
populate them, many RPM's are relocatable, although not all are. One way to
get around this would be to chroot into the alternate "/" and then install
/etc, reconfigure your lilo.conf/grub.conf, and if it goes boom reboot to
the original system. i.e. copy all the rpm's into a dir then do a
rpm -Uvh --force --nodep *.rpm, make sure /dev/ is created, copy in /etc,
and so on.

You could use a tool such as alien to rip the rpm apart and turn it into a
tarball, thus allowing you to forcibly relocate files if the rpm doesn't
support relocation.

http://www.seifried.org/lasg/software/

Hope this helps.

Kurt Seifried, kurt (at) seifried (dot) org [email concealed]
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http://seifried.org/security/

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