migration to 64bit ?

[Loïc Martin]

' =JeffH ' wrote:
> I've been reading through the various 64bit threads with interest. I'm on a 
> core2duo machine, presently running 32bit.
> 
> My overall question is what are the (detailed) steps would one take to migrate 
> a system from, say, 32bit Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ("Hardy Heron") to 64bit Hardy?
I'm not an expert on the subject of migration, but I don't think people
mean going from i386 to amd64 when they say you can upgrade.

The safest route, and the one that is also useful long-term, is to have
two releases installed at a time. If you made the mistake to only have
one big partition instead of an OS partition and at least one data
partition, you can resize quite safely with gparted or a tool like that,
then create new partitions, and install the amd64 version on one of the
new partitions.

You can either put your home on a separate partition, or just copy/paste
your important files in Hardy i386 (even easier if your keep most of
your data on a separate partition. If you got any trouble, the i386
partition is still there if you want to pick some configuration files
you tweaked, and in the even you harm your system one day, you just
reboot on the second OS and can keep working without any downtime.

> My video card is nVidia, and it appears they have a 64bit linux driver. As 
> threads here have indicated, there is now 64bit support for Flash, Java, etc. 
> So those main items are apparently addressed.
For Hardy, you'd use 32 bit flash through ndiswrapper, which is not hard
to setup, but far from stellar. If it doesn't work well enough for you,
Jaunty has the new 64 bit flash from Adobe, and Intrepid has unofficial
backported 64 bit flash, both releases would work better (wait till
April for Jaunty).

Java on amd64 isn't all perfect, but for some people it works without a
glitch - just depends the sites you use. The situation is improving, and
 Intrepid gives better results than Hardy, Jaunty better than Intrepid
(Jaunty is almost identical, I only found a really small presentation
error that didn't prevent the use of the complex applet I tried).

> One item that hasn't really been discussed is virtual machines: I presently 
> use vmware v6 to run at least one guest OS (winXP), and sometimes linux VMs. 
> In looking at VMware's site, it seems that they've had 64bit support for a 
> while now, and one can run 32bit guest OS's on 64bit host OS's, so that 
> appears to be just a matter of downloading the x86_64 installer, yes?

Whatever your solution you'll have a 64 bit version of the program you
use, and you can run 32 or 64 bit versions without trouble. With a good
processor, having a 32 bit VM of Ubuntu would ease your doubts, even if
you didn't have to use it - you'll know that were you to face a little
problem, you could still run the VM and get it over with.

Loïc