preupgrade or netinstall from i686 to x86_64

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 09/01/2011 09:05 PM, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
> I don't see an option in preupgrade to go from F13 i686 to F14 x86_64.
> Is it possible?

Yes, it is possible, but (for me at least) it entauked a whole bunch of
grief.

What I did was to use the F14 x86_64 install DVD, and do an upgrade.

This is not an officially supported upgrade path (and I think it even
tells you that and gives you the option to either abort or continue).
I chose to continue, and it upgraded a whole bunch of RPMs, but, in the
process, I ended up with a lot of duplicate RPMs of mixed architecture
(F13.i686 & F14.x86_64) for some set of RPMs.  I ended up going through
my RPM list by hand and fixing up what I could using various techniques
(yum update, rpm -i --force, rpm --erase --justdb, a couple of scripts
which removed both versions and then re-installed the x86_64 version,
whatever I could get to achieve what I wanted.  It was very time
consuming, and the yum error messages would take a long time to print
out, and in a virtual console, I often could not see the entire output
(the graphical UI was not initially working, and was one of the last
things I was able to get working).

> Or is it possible with an F14 x86_64 netinstall iso disk?

Fedora should provide a better upgrade path for changing architectures
(at least for i686->x86_64, I'm not sure it makes much sense between
incompatible architectures), but, their official suggestion is to just
"re-install" from scratch to avoid the grief that I went through.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at verizon.net
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)