Hi Reid On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 16:31 -0500, Reid Priedhorsky wrote: > Bottom line: I would like to upgrade with as little pain as possible. I > installed a SATA software RAID not too long ago, and the only components > that need replacement are motherboard, RAM, and CPU. I have been googling > but haven't yet been able to form a coherent strategy. That's what I did. My AMD64 system must be almost two years old now. > Can I buy 64-bit (amd64) stuff and just do what I have been doing, i.e., > drop it in and reboot, keeping my i386 install? If so: What are the > drawbacks? (E.g., performance hit, memory limitations.) Can I eventually > upgrade to an amd64 installation in-place later? I bought a Asus A8V AMD64 motherboard, memory & AMD Athlon 3500 CPU at a local computer fair. I was there with my local LUG prompting Linux. I took an old system which included DVD writer, Graphics card, hard disks, etc and just swapped in the new hardware. Apart from a new PSU that was all I bought, everything else was re-cycled from hardware I already had. I can remember running KNOPPIX and it was fast. We were selling KNOPPIX disk to cover the cost of stall so that's why it KNOPPIX, to demo it to the punters. It ran just fine, everything worked that we tried and much, much quicker. So if you want to just upgrade the AMD64 stuff and leave the rest alone you can. I would install a 486 kernel image before you change any hardware. That way you will have something that works for all CPU types. I have a tendency to do this anyway on my 32-bit systems so that if the motherboard dies (as it did once for my LAN server) I can just move the hardware to a spare system quickly. This will not work if you install a 64-bit OS as the kernel has to be 64-bit to support it. You can keep the 32-bit kernel if you want, but why? There are AMD64 bit kernels in the i386 archive so you can run a 32-bit OS with a 64bit kernel. I've not done this myself, so I can't advices you of any issues. Personal I bought a 64-bit system because I wanted to go pure 64. I don't even bother with a 32-bit chroot environment, I'm happy with the system as is. Somethings don't work well - flash for example, although there are workarounds. Personally I like my workstation browser not getting those flash ads, and if I want to watch something from YouTube then I just hope on to my laptop and view it there. Hope this helps Steve
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