Is there an easy way to upgrade the system to x64 from x86 without losing settings and having to repartition etc?
Ubuntu – How to upgrade from x86 to x64 without losing settings
32-bit64-bitsystem-installation
32-bit64-bitsystem-installation
Is there an easy way to upgrade the system to x64 from x86 without losing settings and having to repartition etc?
Best Answer
You can just perform an x86-64 install over the top of your existing i386 install. There's no need to reformat or repartition - the Ubuntu installer has supported keeping the contents of
/home
and (most of)/etc
(and other data directories) for a couple of releases now.That will get you most of the way there; you'll keep all your configuration, but you won't have the same software installed.
To do that, the guide from this answer should work:
dpkg --get-selections > ~/installed-software
in a terminal.sudo dpkg --set-selections < ~/installed-software
followed bysudo apt-get -f install
. There will probably be some packages that can't be installed, as there are some i386 packages without x86-64 counterparts -libc6-686
, the 686-optimised libc is the common example.