[plug] 64 Bit Upgrade of Ubuntu

[Patrick Coleman]

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Tim <weirdit at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't believe it is possible.

Well, that's no fun :)

http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/debian_arch_up/index.html

"This procedure is, in every possible respect, a bad idea. If it eats
your firstborn, please don't come crying to me. You probably don't
need a complete backup of your data to do this safely, but you DO,
without question, need boot media that has lots of things on it, like
dpkg, for when you fry your system. The expected result of this
procedure is a machine on which nothing works, where "nothing"
includes "ls". Seriously; the official documentation specifically
declares this procedure to be impossible, which should give you some
idea of how bad an idea this is."

The author then goes on to describe the procedure, which involves
running cool commands like "dpkg --force-depends --force-architecture
--force-overwrite -i libc6-i386_2.5-9_amd64.deb"

I recall looking at this to see whether it would be easier to do this
to move a server from 32- to 64-bit than reinstalling; I chose to
reinstall. I'd have tried it if I had the time, but then I've been
known to consider upgrading Debian to Ubuntu to be a fun weekend
project :)

-Patrick

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