On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 14:07 +0000, Paul Johnson wrote: > Hi, > > My main box decided to snuff it last week (motherboard and processor > decided to fry). My erstwhile friend in the computer shop I use has > said that he has a nice 64 bit processor and motherboard going for a > small amount of money. > > The problem I have is that if I go the 64 bit route then I'll need to > install the 64 bit OS (I can stay 32 bit, but what's the point with > 8Gb of memory). > > Is there a safe way to install the x86_64 system over the 32 bit > version and then clean off the 32 bit stuff that is no longer needed? I did that to my Fedora 11 system in October 2009. It took a significant amount of manual work and scripting and I hit a number of minor issues. I'm not sure I would call the procedure "safe", but it did work. The procedure was like this: - Change /etc/rpm/platform to x86_64-redhat-linux and put "%_transaction_color 3" in /etc/rpm/macros . - Install the x86_64 kernel and boot to it. - Install the x86_64 version of rpm. - Construct a yum script with "install" lines for the x86_64 versions of all installed packages. Repeatedly try to run the script and add "erase" lines for any i?86 packages that cause file conflicts until it succeeds. - Watch the output. When scriptlets fail, fix things manually. - Remove all unneeded i?86 packages. I needed to keep a few proprietary packages that are only available for i?86, so I used a script to walk the dependencies and figure out which i?86 packages could be removed. YMMV with rawhide. -- Matt -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
