A couple of months ago I bought a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, but I realized I was running on a 32 bits system which meant I couldn’t use all my RAM. I had to switch to 64 bits. It takes so much time for me to restore my system that I didn’t have the courage to go through it again (did it last year, switched from Debian to Fedora, took me a week), so I stayed with 32 bits. Yesterday I had to upgrade to Fedora 16 and decided to do the switch to 64 bits at the same time… I’d like to share my experience with you!

First of all, I had to download the 64 bits version of the fedora CD which is not the default download on the website, I had to click on the small “more download options” to get the choice and I realized that’s how I got the 32 bit  install in the first place (Fedora download page should definitely list both links). Then I made a backup of all the installed packages on my system so I can restore them on the new system :

 yum -C info $(rpm -qa) | grep “Name   :” | cut -c 15- > packages-list.log

This will list all of the packages installed, and ask yum for the exact name of the package (instead of “git-1.7.6.5-1.fc15.i686”, it becomes “git”).. if you have a better method of doing that, let me know, but this did the trick for me.

Update: A better method was given to me by Hansen and Richard Godbee in the comments : rpm -qa –qf “%{name}\n” > packages-list.log

I obviously had a separate partition for the  /home directory, which made things easier, so I backed up in it the important directories which were: /opt, /root, /etc, /usr/local and my scratchbox home dir. Then the moment of truth, reboot into the live cd, install it, make sure not to format the /home partition, and reboot into the new 64 bits system.

First of all, as soon as I tried to login, gnome 3 would completely crash and would not let me log in, so I had to create a new user, login into gnome 3, then “ls -la” the files in the new user’s home dir, then delete (move away) those same files/directories from my own home dir, so that gnome doens’t crash anymore… apparently, my settings suddenly became incompatible or something… It’s important to note that I had some further problems later and I had to copy back .gnome2/keyrings otherwise the gnome-keyring daemon would freeze.

To restore all the packages that I had before, I first had to re-install (manually) the rpmfusion repository (free and nonfree), then I just did a simple :

yum install $(cat packages-list.log)

And after 1.2GB of downloads and 1020 package installs, my system was technically “restored” to how it was before the format. I look at the “No package foobar” lines given by yum at that point which told me what I needed to install manually (opera, skype, dropbox), which I did, and a few libs that apparently don’t exist anymore in Fedora 16. Now I just had to restore the /opt for some apps I had in there (and recompile the EFL/E17),  copy the Enlightenment.desktop file to /usr/share/xsessions, restore my /etc/hosts (which had some custom entries), restore some custom scripts I wrote into /usr/local/bin and recompile the libraries I was working on and had installed in /usr/local (gstreamer, libnice, farstream). I also had to install a few 32 bit libraries so I could install skype (which only comes in 32 bit flavor).

It took me about a day of work/compilation, but now I feel back home, don’t notice any difference in my system other than the fact that I will now be writing 32-bits bugs instead of 64-bits bugs 🙂