I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on a Cybertronic machine I bought a year and a half ago. It works well enough with the generic kernel etc. but I have dual AMD Athlon X2 processors in this box and wuld like to use them to their best potential. Is there a step-by-step guide to switching to the AMD 64 version and keeping all my files and software straight?

Hardware specs:

Computer: FOXCONN MCP61M05 (version FAB A1)
Processors: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2 of them)
Host Bridges: AMD K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration, K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map, K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller, K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
VGA Controller: nVidia C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430]
ISA Bridge: MCP61 LPC Bridge
PCI Bridge: MCP61 PCI Express bridge (3 of them)
RAM Memory Controller: MCP61 Memory Controller
SMBus Controller: MCP61 SMBus
IDE storage controller: MCP61 IDE
Optical drive: HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GH22NP20
Bridge: MCP61 Ethernet
Audio device: MCP61 High Definition Audio
USB OHCI Controller: MCP61 USB Controller
USB EHCI Controller: MCP61 USB Controller
IDE Storage Controller: MCP61 SATA Controller
hard drive: WDC WD1600AAJS-2, 149.1 GB (160,041,885,696 bytes), firmware version 01.03A10

I believe it is very difficult to do and that a reinstall is very much preferred.

However, I did see this a few months ago where a guy successfully did it on Fedora 7. And here's one for Debian that might be more instructive.

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Eeep. That stuff is just way beyond my ability.

What would happen if I had another harddrive installed, installed the AMD64 version on that, and then moved my files over to the new HD and reinstalled all my programmes on the new system? I'd have a dual-boot two-hard-drive box for a while, and then if it worked I could wipe the original drive and use it for extra storage ...

That should work, but is it necessary? How full are your partitions? If you've used only a fraction of the space then you could use a liveCD to shrink the existing partitions (other than swap) and create new ones (other than swap) and install then copy things, then delete the old and expand new partitions.

But disks are inexpensive and you say you have 149GiB, which is fairly small, so maybe your new drive idea is better anyway.

Moving your own files is the easy part of the "copy" step. The harder part is the files that store the settings of various programs. Since it will be the same version of Ubuntu more of that can be simply copied than when changing version. But I wouldn't bet that every program's settings files are compatible across an architecture change (maybe not even across a reinstall) so you might need some extra thought and/or tricks to getting settings copied.

Some of that is similar to the situation in my own thread asking about a related switch a while back:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...is-7-a-705660/

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It's about 2/3 full. Lessee ... I have 46.9 GiB of free space left on it.

If disk drives were expensive or you had no budget for computer hardware (as compared to man hours) you could resize a few time to get from where you are to reinstalled and copied on 64 bit, despite 2/3 full. But obviously that is a lame idea for any sane valuation of the extra man hours it would require.

BTW, you gave lots of hardware specs, but not the size of ram. At the risk of drawing in lots of bad advice saying "don't use 64 bit OS's with less than 4GB of ram", how much ram do you have?

There is some amount, ballpark 0.5GB in my opinion (but maybe even 1GB), where for typical uses of a computer you should consider it too little ram for a 64 bit OS to be a decent idea.

I hope you aren't expecting some dramatic change in performance. Some programs run significantly faster in 64 bit mode than in 32. Some programs run faster in 32 bit mode. Overall, the difference usually isn't dramatic.

2GiB of RAM ...

Might not be worth bothering with then?