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Re: new software if moving to amd64?



On 10/03/2014 11:20 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 08:38:51AM -0700, Ray Andrews wrote:
Gentlemen,
Are you sure that is always true?  Sure I may be, but not everyone on
the list is likely to be.
Mere, vulgar flattery ;-)
I just upgraded to the 'amd64' kernel.  I've always been a 32 bit
lad up till now. The kernel runs fine, but I'm wondering if there is
anything else  to do, specifically if my software needs to be
somehow changed from 32 bit to 64 bit.  There seems to be no special
repository for 64 bit.  Or am I all good?
Well you can run a 64 bit kernel with 32 bit user space.  You can even
create chroots with debootstrap that are amd64 architecture inside and
that works too.

Of course with multiarch in wheezy and above you can even install
packages from both i386 and amd64 at the same time (using apt-get
install packagename:architecture), after telling dpkg once to add the
other architecture.  dpkg has a concept of the default architecture
of an installation which was whatever it was installed as initially,
although you can change it.

The sources.list doesn't change in general, it simply starts downloading
all the enabled architectures that you told dpkg to use (using dpkg
--add-architecture).

Ok thanks, that's a good start right there. Looking at various blogs and such, it seems no two people can agree if the conversion to '64 is beneficial or even wise. I have only 2 GB of RAM on this machine, so that's no motive. I hear talk of various problems on the one hand, vs. claims of better performance on the other. Can I sorta slide from '32 to '64 by degrees? I mean, so that whenever I do an upgrade it will convert what's convertible while leaving the rest of the system '32? Or should I start afresh? Or should I just leave this older machine alone?


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