LinuxQuestions.org - upgrade to stable 64bit sarge

- Debian (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/)

- - upgrade to stable 64bit sarge (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/upgrade-to-stable-64bit-sarge-380237/)

upgrade to stable 64bit sarge

Would I be able to just upgrade from unstable to stable or would I have to start from sractch

Unfortunately, you really need to start from scratch because the 64bit files are incompatible with 32bit ones.
However, if you have free space on you disk and can create a new partition (resizing the old one if necessary) then you can use your current 32bit system as a 'chroot' for running 32bit mozilla/firefox for flash/java plugins and for Openoffice (until v2 comes out) and other programs that need 32 bit libraries.
If you don't think you'll need lots of 32 bit programs there are packages of 32bit libraries that can be installed within the 64bit userland, meaning you can eclim back all you're hard disk space.

Hugh

PS Check out the debian-amd64 mailing list. There's plenty of people there who have helped make the amd64 port work well and they can often help with hardware and software problems.

I thought there was a stable 64bit port

Sorry, I should read more carefully. I consider a move from unstable to stable a "downgrade" so assumed it was a move to 64bit.
Apologies.

If you put the stable entries into sources.list then you can explicitly ask for a stable version of something such as
apt-get install xserver-xfree86/stable
but this does not resolve dependancies so other packages are not automatically downgraded with it, packages are set to be removed if they coflict.

Have a look at the following script

Code:

apt-get install --reinstall `dpkg --get-selections | sed --expression="s/\(\S*\)\(.*\)/\1\/stable/"`

It should get the list of all installed packages and then request the reinstallation of the stable versions of everything. However since not everything has a corresponding stable version eg xserver-xorg, cpp-4.0, another way would be to save the list and remove all the entries that have no stable version and uninstall/downgrade those packages manually

Code:

dpkg --get-selections | sed --expression="s/\(\S*\)\(.*\)/\1\/stable/" > package_list

... edit file...

apt-get install --reinstall `cat package_list`

Note that downgrading the xserver from xserver-xorg to xserver-xfree86 in stable may need some re-tweaking to get x working again.

I hope thats helpful