Re: Installer: 32 vs. 64 bit

[Chris Knadle <Chris.Knadle@coredump.us>]

Juliusz Chroboczek:
> I've been encouraging my students to install Debian on their personal
> machines, and we've found out that a lot of them get the wrong Debian
> installer:
> 
>   - some of them attempt to install an AMD64 version of Debian in
>     a 32-bit-only virtual machine;
>   - others attempt to install an i386 version on 64-bit hardware.
> 
> In both cases, the installer crashes with no useful error message (in the
> former case, it crashes just after installing grub, in the latter case, it
> crashes straight away).

When discussing virtual machines it would be helpful to mention which virtual
machine hypervisor is being used, because the resulting behavior can differ
depending on hypervisor.  For instance (at least at one time) it was possible to
install a 64-bit Debian on a 32-bit host under VirtualBox, but not under some
other hypervisors.  [e.g. hypervisors -- Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMware, Xen, KVM.]

And as Peter Green mentioned, most of the hypervisors require certain BIOS
features [VT-x or AMD-V] to be active before a virtual machine can be installed.
(VirtualBox didn't require this at one time, but seems to require it with
version 2 and up.)

   -- Chris

-- 
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us