1. Gives a fake root environment. This package is intended to enable something like: dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot i.e. to remove the need to become root for a package build. This is done by setting LD_PRELOAD to libfakeroot.so, which provides wrappers around getuid, chown, chmod, mknod, stat, ..., thereby creating a fake root environment. If you don't understand any of this, you do not need fakeroot! From Debian 3.0r0 APT