i386 yum upgrade to x86?
 

We have several servers that we have been running FC4 i386 even though they are AMD x64 based servers.

Since the x64 distro seems to have stabilized and, from what I understand, it is rather solid, I started wondering how to get what we paid for out of these nice x64 processors.

So, is it possible to "upgrade" to the x64 distro from the i386 version (via the installer or something)?

What would be more appealing, of course, would be a "live" update method similar to what is defined in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq which would only result in the downtime necessary to reboot the server...

It's really just a wishful thought that is being tossed around, but it would be awesome to make it become a reality. :)

Your best bet is to download and install the x86_64 version from CD/DVD, yum has no clean way to perform this operation. In fact it has a (big) problem resolving all of the dependency issues with 32-bit/64-bit packages on this huge of a task.

A lot of packageXYZ (32-bit) conflicts with packageXYZ (64-bit) errors, has nothing to do with yum exactly. It is just the packages cannot be simply replaced, they need to be removed then the other versions can be installed.


FYI: as of January 16th, 2006 FC3 is now in legacy mode.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedor.../msg00044.html

Easier said than done, unfortuantely, as these are production boxes.

Interesting.. this was also said of upgrading from FC3->FC4 via yum, but that is possible...

Ah, well.. I might just wait for FC5 to be released and upgrade from there.

Trust me it is a real pain, for example;

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=403308

Basically the OP is having problems updating using yum all of the x86 and x86_64 packages. I'm still waiting to see if the OP has gotten past the KDE-3.5 upgrade portion.

If these are production boxes then may I suggest using CentOS-4.2 instead;
http://www.centos.org/ Longer (by years) support cycle and it is based on RHEL4.2 (4.3 is in beta now) so it's vary stable and well supported.

Hrmm.. makes me wonder if x64 is ready for prime time.

Not sure I can change releases at this point in time (in regards to CentOS), but I will look in to it. Thanks!

Yes, x86_64 is ready for prime time....... Unfortunately many applications and tools are not quite ready yet in both the Linux and Microsoft worlds. It will take a while for all the x86 code to be made x86_64 compliant, but more and more are becoming so everyday, it's just a matter of effort, time and money.