I've got Ubuntu installed for years on my desktop PC. I changed the hardware twice while still having a very stable distribution -- I could always boot after a major hardware upgrade. I can't say the same about Windows XP. Anyway, that's not the topic here. To migrate from my 32 bits distribution to a 64 bits version was actually pretty easy. I first made a backup of the system partition with partimage just in case:
partimage -z1 -d save /dev/sda1 /mnt/backup Ubuntu32_904_sda1.partimg.gz
Partimage can be found on many LiveCD. I used System Rescue 1.1.7.
Here are the steps:
- Launch the installation from the Ubuntu 9.04 64 bits CD in safe graphic mode. For some reason, the default driver doesn't like my nvidia video card too much.
- Choose manual partitioning (default partitioning will either install the new OS side by side with the old one or worth -- erase the hard disk completely)
- In my case, I have a 30 GB partition for the system (/), a 965 GB (/home) and 4 GB swap partition (which I think is pretty useless, I should delete it someday)
- Select the system partition and click modify, then check the Format partition check-box and choose / as mounting point.
- If you have a /home partition, select it and choose /home as mounting point. Obviously, do not format it!
- Go ahead. It will sums-up the deleting operations before applying them. Check that everything is OK.
- This is it. When the installation is complete, cross your fingers and reboot the computer!
My new system worked at once. All personal settings being stored in /home, nothing was lost in the move. However, some packets are now missing in action.
NVidia driver I use the proprietary NVidia driver to get better performances (at the expense of using closed source software). Rather than using the Synaptic package manager, I downloaded the driver on nvidia's website as it was the newest version there. To install it, I went to the console by using the CTRL+ALT+F1 key combination. Then I did the following:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run
Unfortunately, I'm using a kernel that nvidia doesn't know of yet. The installer could however compile the driver by itself and install it in a breeze. I could then restart gdm. No reboot required!
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
I then launched the nvidia-settings tool to configure the screens (setting dual view was enough in my case).
Compiz Compiz was already up and running, but the window decorator didn't start. This is because I'm using a little tool called fusion-icon to do that:
sudo apt-get install fusion-icon
After a logout / login gymnastic, the window manager works like a charm.
Easy, isn't it? It took me longer to write this than to actually do all the required steps.
Some additional stuff:
Adobe flash player
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz tar xvf libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
Sun Java6 Plugin
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin
32 bits application
rem Example: Skype wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-deb sudo aptitude install libqt4-core libqt4-gui ia32-libs sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb