Hello

I've thought out my migration plan, but since the box in question is my
computer at work, I cannot afford to "loose" it for long.
I would like to ask you for opinion or suggestions.

I was thinking to do it like this:
1. Upgrade my 32bit Sarge to 32bit Etch
2. Make a list of installed packages
3. On separate partition install a base 64bit Etch
4. Install the list of packages from 32bit Sarge
5. Replace the /etc folder with /etc folder from 32bit Etch version
6. Delete /home folder and mount /home partition in it's place

Will it work?

Thanks,
Mitja


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Mitja Podreka wrote:
> Hello
>
> I've thought out my migration plan, but since the box in question is my
> computer at work, I cannot afford to "loose" it for long.
> I would like to ask you for opinion or suggestions.
>
> I was thinking to do it like this:
> 1. Upgrade my 32bit Sarge to 32bit Etch
> 2. Make a list of installed packages
> 3. On separate partition install a base 64bit Etch
> 4. Install the list of packages from 32bit Sarge
> 5. Replace the /etc folder with /etc folder from 32bit Etch version
> 6. Delete /home folder and mount /home partition in it's place
>
> Will it work?
>
> Thanks,
> Mitja
>
>

Yes and no.

1) Should be fine.
2) Should be fine.
3) Should be fine.
4) Here you could run into problems because some packages that are
available for 32-bit are not available for 64-bit, but there are not
many, and most of those packages are non-free so if you stick to
packages in main, you should be OK.
5) No, that would most surely break the system. Leave the 64-bit /etc
like it is, just modify the files that you need to change.
6) That should work, although you're not specifying which system the
/home is from. AFAIK, the configuration data in /home will be fine
migrating it from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system as long as the
versions of the programs that use said data are the same.

Another way you might want to go about it, is to just upgrade a 32-bit
setup to a 64 bit one, rather than installing multiple versions. That
being said, I have both the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version
installed, but use the 32 bit version most of the time. I *could* use
the 64-bit version and chroot to the 32-bit apps that I need that are
not available for 64-bit, but it's not very often that I need the 64-bit
power and it IMO isn't worth the trouble of setting it all up.

Joe

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Joe Hart wrote:
> [sic]
> That being said, I have both the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version
> installed, but use the 32 bit version most of the time. I *could* use
> the 64-bit version and chroot to the 32-bit apps that I need that are
> not available for 64-bit, but it's not very often that I need the 64-bit
> power and it IMO isn't worth the trouble of setting it all up.
Well, this is an interesting point.
Actually I don't need the power of 64bit system either, but I thought
that since I have to upgrade to Etch on a 64bit computer I might just
use 64bit OS.
I guess that for now I will just upgrade to Etch and wait till I buy
64bit computer at home to experiment with 64bits.

Thanks for suggestion.

Regards,
Mitja


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On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 12:19:36 +0200
Joe Hart <j.hart@orange.nl> wrote:

> Another way you might want to go about it, is to just upgrade a 32-bit
> setup to a 64 bit one, rather than installing multiple versions. That
> being said, I have both the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version
> installed, but use the 32 bit version most of the time. I *could* use
> the 64-bit version and chroot to the 32-bit apps that I need that are
> not available for 64-bit, but it's not very often that I need the 64-bit
> power and it IMO isn't worth the trouble of setting it all up.

I did this just to see if it could be done and I don't recommend it.
You need a clean 64 but environment to begin with and boot into when
things get sticky so you can chroot the system being converted, and
there are likely to be glitches with the system afterwords while you
are getting things sorted out. I still have one glitch when I upgrade
packages indicating indicating some error in readline.pm that I don't
see in the clean install.

If you go to google and search there are guides for setting up the
chroot environment on another partition, where to mount it, how to
bootstrap it, and I remember some mention of making it bootable as
well.

I have not really noticed that much not being available for 64 bit. The
things I can think of off the top of my head are....

Realplayer/Helix player
w32codecs
Flash
Java browser plugin

Depending on what you do swfdecode or Gnash might cover your flash
needs and the gcj browser plug-in might cover your java plug-in needs,
security is a concern with the gcj plug-in though.

Nspluginwrapper will let you use 32 bit plug-ins with iceweasel. It
works for flash if you download the tar.gz from adobe, extract it, then
use nspluginwrapper to install it. I have not got around to trying it
with java since there are extra issues with needing a 32 bit java in
addition to a 32 bit java plug-in.

I don't know if all the codecs from the mplayer site work, there is an
amd64 esenential codecs package.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

Later, Seeker


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