Have 32 bit Fedora installed, but need 64 bit.


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I just noticed that I don't have the 64-bit version of Fedora 10 installed - stupid me. Any way to upgrade from within Fedora, or are we looking at re-installing from scratch?

Thanks.

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It is a bad idea to update an existing install if you want my opinion. Why do you need to do that? 64bit OS are not as stable and suported as 32bit OS, it is simillar for windows (OSX is not trully 64bit, but the kernel is (I think)). And you don't really save download by doing that, it will redownload everything you installed, this is much more than th 700mb cd.

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It is a bad idea to update an existing install if you want my opinion. Why do you need to do that? 64bit OS are not as stable and suported as 32bit OS, it is simillar for windows (OSX is not trully 64bit, but the kernel is (I think)). And you don't really save download by doing that, it will redownload everything you installed, this is much more than th 700mb cd.

Are you sure about that, or are you just talking out of your ass? Been running 64bit Ubuntu since hardy heron and have not had one hiccup. The only problems experienced have been with PA, and as we all know, that is not a 64bit architecture problem. There is no such thing as a unstable 64bit linux Distro.

To OP, personally i would recommend a install from scratch, unless you are very linux savvy. I myself am by no means and expert so what is why i recommend a fresh install, but if you feel like giving the task at hand a try, good luck. The best thing about Linux is the learning curve, and you only start that by just diving in.

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I use both 32bit and 64bit Gentoo and debian since 2005 and I can compare both, firefox crash more often on 64bit and is slower that the same in 32bit (I mean 2x-3x slower), now plugin exist (both flash and java) but they are slower too. Multimedia application like cinelerra and kino are less stable too. NVIDIA driver also crash more often, and even more ofter when playing 32bit only 3d game in 64bit. Umm, the whole system is less responsive, I am not the only one of thinking that, but about this one, on my system, it may be my fault. Some codec (win32codec) are only availible in 32bit and requirer 32bit player to use them (it is getting better on this one). Many propriatary open office plugins are availible only in 32bit, same for more professional applications (open source can't do everything (yet), and propriatary file format dosen't help). I also have to keep almost 400mb of duplicated 32bit libs to ensure compatibility with 32bit apps (look in /usr/lib32, you too have some), that is pure disk space lost. I can go on longer, but I will continue to use 64 os as my primary os, but only because I am too lazy to reinstall.

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Yeah, if you plan on doing some gaming with your computer I would just keep the 32-bit version. Most of the games available today are 32-bit only. Theoretically software compiled for 32-bit platforms would have no issues running on a 64-bit platform, but that's not so linear in real life.

Keep the current install would be my advice. But if you choose to go 64-bit, save the configs you have done so far and do a fresh install. "Upgrading" would cause a lot of issues...

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Are you sure about that, or are you just talking out of your ass? Been running 64bit Ubuntu since hardy heron and have not had one hiccup. The only problems experienced have been with PA, and as we all know, that is not a 64bit architecture problem. There is no such thing as a unstable 64bit linux Distro.

To OP, personally i would recommend a install from scratch, unless you are very linux savvy. I myself am by no means and expert so what is why i recommend a fresh install, but if you feel like giving the task at hand a try, good luck. The best thing about Linux is the learning curve, and you only start that by just diving in.

+1 (Y)

I run 64-bit Debian and it works flawlessly. To say that 64 bit Linux is less stable that 32 bit is just not true. 64 bit is equally as stable as 32 bit. There are a few programs that are not 64-bit compatible (Flash Player, for instance), but if you run 32-bit Firefox, you can use 32-bit Flash Player. 64-bit architecture will run 32-bit applications in many cases. Gaming is not what I am into, so you'll have to ask others about that. All of my hardware works without a flaw at all. Stable as a rock.

Speed of the distro is more a result of hardware utilization (available RAM, for instance). And I have almost all of the same software as 32-bit (including w64codec).

http://debian-multimedia.org/dists/stable/...e/w64codecs.php

The same goes for 64-bit Open Office: http://jlp.holodeck1.com/blog/2007/06/15/6...ed-and-working/ It came with my distro automatically, with all of the bells and whistles.

I also suggest that you install Fedora and not move to Gentoo. That is probably more than you need to take on at this point. Building from scratch will surely give you some fits...... however it is up to you. ;)

32-bit Linux distros generally run fine on 64-bit hardware. The issue is that you are not getting the maximum potential out of your system's performance.....so if you decide to move to 64-bit I recommend that you install Fedora from scratch (clean install). Less chance of mixing architectures that way (Y).

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Thanks for the great (and very detailed) responses, everyone.

I already have Fedora 10 32-bit installed. Unless there is some compelling advantage at this point to go 64-bit, I'll keep what I have. I'm not sure how much 64-bit tech Fedora takes advantage of.

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What do you mean by 64 bit tech? 64bit is just a greater memory bus after all, you can have more memory. The 32bit limit in Linux is 16gb (not 3.5 like in Windows XP), so if you have 8gb, like me, you can use them anyway. Other instrction set like SSE3, SSE4 does not requier 64bit, they just need to be suported by application. Fedora is i586 if I remember, it is outdated by more than a decade, but it is better than windows (i386), the performance gain is not big, you can even talk about loss like with the famous IO bug that exist since Linux 2.6.15 that reduce performances by 95% on great IO load.

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What do you mean by 64 bit tech? 64bit is just a greater memory bus after all, you can have more memory. The 32bit limit in Linux is 16gb (not 3.5 like in Windows XP), so if you have 8gb, like me, you can use them anyway. Other instrction set like SSE3, SSE4 does not requier 64bit, they just need to be suported by application. Fedora is i586 if I remember, it is outdated by more than a decade, but it is better than windows (i386), the performance gain is not big, you can even talk about loss like with the famous IO bug that exist since Linux 2.6.15 that reduce performances by 95% on great IO load.

There's more to the 64bit extension to x86 than just an increased virtual memory space (not memory address bus, the two are very different). Your argument only applies to "sane" architectures like MIPS, PPC, etc.

As for 64-bit Linux in general, remember that Linux was ported to 64-bit architectures over 10 years ago with the DEC Alpha port in the early 90's (followed by MIPS64 and PPC64 and IA64 and SPARC64, and a bunch of others). Linux on 64-bit is stable, it's the closed source crap which causes problems.

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