[BBLISA] Upgrading from RHEL5 32 to 64-bit?

[Mark Manley]

A quickie dirty method of determining if a Linux box is 64-bit is to check
for the existence of a /lib64 directory or see if the uname -p is "x86_64"
or "i386".  You won't find those on a 32-bit system unless someone manually
created on.  There are some flags you can pass to rpm to make it tell you if
the 32 or 64 bit version of an rpm is present, but I don't remember what it
is off-hand.  I don't know if there is an analogous flag for dpkg on
Debian/Ubuntu, but you can just look at the output of dpkg -l and see if
they are i386 (32) or amd64 (64).

I usually just re-install the OS when going from 32 to 64 bit.  I am usually
more conservative about these things.  There may be a direct upgrade path,
but I don't know how well it works off-hand.

Hope that helps!

-MM

On 6/28/07, Scott Ehrlich <scott at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> Is there a way to check whether 32 or 64-bit RHEL5 was installed on a
> system?
> For that matter, any way to check 32 or 64-bit versions of any RedHat or
> Linux-based (including Debian/Ubuntu) system?
>
> Next, if a user's system was installed with 32-bit RHEL5, is there a
> reasonable
> way to upgrade it to 64-bit?   Can the 64-bit CDs be installed and let
> them
> take over?   Does a fresh install need to be done?
>
> Would the same hold true for Fedora, CentOS, etc?
>
> Please advise.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Scott
>
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