On 2013-01-24 14:51 +0100, Mark Allums wrote:
> Can one do this? Not: Is this easy, but merely: Is this something that is
> feasible?
>
> I have a 32-bit system that I would like to migrate into 64-bitness within
> the same basic framework, within the same "install". That is, can I go from
>
> 32-bit kernel-arch + 32-bit userland =>
> 64-bit kernel-arch + 32-bit userland =>
This works just fine (with a few caveats, e.g. virtualbox does _not_
work with this combination), just install and boot a linux-image-*-amd64
kernel. I've been running that combination for years.
> 64-bit kernel-arch + 64-bit userland
>
> within Debian Squeeze or Wheezy, or Bodhi Lucid or Precise? Without a clean
> install?
No, this is not really possible, at least not without a high risk of
totally breaking your system. What you _can_ do to minimize downtime is
to run "debootstrap --arch=amd64" in a dedicated filesystem and then
install the same packages as on your i386 system in the chroot (export
the list on i386 with "dpkg --get-selections" and import it on amd64
with "dpkg --set-selections"), and then copy over your /etc directory
(you need to adapt fstab of course, but no other changes should be
necessary).
Then you should be able to dual-boot the i386 and amd64 installations,
and you can dispose of the i386 one when you no longer need it.
> I was thinking that multiarch might help this happen.
There are two problems with that:
- Not all packages have been multiarchified, including some important
packages with many reverse dependencies like perl and python.
Crossgrading those will leave you with many broken packages, at least
temporarily. Cross your fingers that apt will show a way out.
- Apt does not properly support crossgrades, for a package foo which is
not "Multi-Arch: same" it treats foo:i386 and foo:amd64 as two
different, conflicting packages. This means that it will remove
foo:i386 before installing foo:amd64 which obviously does not work for
Essential packages, so you have to crossgrade those with dpkg alone.
This is quite a hassle since you have to install all necessary
libraries beforehand.
I have crossgraded some packages in i386 chroots that way, but in the
current state of affairs I would definitely _not_ dare to try a full
crossgrade on my main system with almost 2000 installed packages.
Cheers,
Sven
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