I have a Debian Stable box that I use as a file/print server and that the kids use for homework. Originally, I installed Woody on a different machine years and years ago (took a week of cron jobs downloading packages over the landline at night) and have been dist-upgrading it ever since. I transplanted the drive to new machines (at least 3 machines), used dd to move the system to larger hard disks, etc. It's still an x86 architecture, but the current box only has 4GB of RAM in it and works well for what it's used for. The CPU is 64-bit capable, but the benefit hasn't outweighed my laziness all these years.

Should I finally bite the bullet and reinstall? Or just run the dist-upgrade again? Or is there an easy cross architecture upgrade now? Does anyone else here have a long continuous dist-upgrade system?

Hi,

I think the longest I've kept an install is about two years, but I don't see why you shouldn't keep dist-upgrading as long as everything is working fine.

Regarding the architecture to use, although it's been a few years since I switched to Debian 64-bit, I think nowadays it's easier to run 32-bit software on 64-bit Debian than it is to do the opposite, but if you don't need to run a particular program that only runs on 64-bit, then you should be fine.

Just in case you're interested in switching to 64-bit, I guess you'd need to install 64-bit Debian from scratch, then you simply need to enable the installation of i386 packages and install them directly from the repositories. You can also install individual 3rd party i386 packages as you would with any other package.

Hope this helps.

I'm not running Debian right now, but, for the almost five years that I did, I found dist-upgrade to be extremely reliable. It took me for Lenny to Squeeze to Wheezy to Sid without a hicough.

I did some research last night and found that you can now "cross grade" Debian. https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading

If I get bored, I may try it out before the dist-upgrade to Jessie. Or if I'm lazy again, I'll just do the dist-upgrade.