Fakeroot provides a fake "root environment" by means of ld_preload and sysv ipc (or tcp) trickery. it puts wrappers around getuid(), chown(), stat(), and other file-manipulation functions, so that unprivileged users can (for instance) populate .deb archives with root-owned files; various build tools use fakeroot for this by default.

this package contains the ld_preload libraries.