On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 04:40:14PM +0200, Adrien Clerc wrote: > I'm in the category of people who installed their Debian 8 years ago, on > an old AMD processor, only i686. My hardware was upgraded since, but the > system remains. I've searched for cross-grade, but nothing serious comes > out, except "reinstall everything". If you have some clear documentation > (at least some steps, I'm curious enough to read some apt manuals), I > think you can go on dropping i386 architecture.
It can be done if you are competent and confident. I successfully crossgraded a production system from i386 to amd64 a while back, roughly following the steps from this blog post: http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/972-How-to-amd64-an-i386-Debian-installation-with-multiarch.html The system in question was originally installed in 1999 (with potato, I think) and has been contiuously upgraded since then. Caveats from my experience, though: * I was doing this on a server, not a desktop. * I put some effort into removing obsolete or unnecessary packages first and making sure that amd64 versions of all my non-Debian packages were available, in order to simplify things. This procedure is much easier to execute on a system whose package database is nice and clean. * I started out by cloning the relevant parts of the system into a chroot, disabling daemon startup, and upgrading that, until I'd got far enough that I was comfortable I could finish the job. * I did this on a stable release. Doing this in testing or unstable where it's more likely that the archive might introduce new versions of Multi-Arch: same packages part-way through the job would have been rather more exciting. * I know dpkg and apt very well, was a contributor to the multiarch design, and am comfortable recovering things by hand if necessary. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140915165025.ga12...@riva.ucam.org