I’ve always upgraded my Fedora laptop incrementally using the recommended tools (yum, preupgrade, fedup). For this reason, my initial decision to install i686 Fedora (back when 32-bit compatibility was important) has carried through, and I’ve always used i686 Fedora, even though the CPU supports x86_64.<\/p>\n
Recently I wanted to try out Mezzano<\/a> in a virtual machine, but it is x86_64-only. Obviously, virtualization tools don’t support running an x86_64 guest on an i686 host, so I shelved the experiment.<\/p>\n Then I found a use for Docker (testing Emacs HTTP authentication schemes), and wanted to try it out. But I ran into this surprising limitation: Docker is 64-bit only<\/a>.<\/p>\n At this point I had two motivators to move to x86_64, but no desire to wipe my system. I discovered an interesting new term, “crossgrading”, when I found these instructions: Cross-grading from i686 to x86_64: it is possible (but unsupported)<\/a>. They were written for Fedora 14, but I decided to try them out on Fedora 22 (after backing up all my data).<\/p>\n Long story short, careful application of I’ve always upgraded my Fedora laptop incrementally using the recommended tools (yum, preupgrade, fedup). For this reason, my initial decision to install i686 Fedora (back when 32-bit compatibility was important) has carried through, and I’ve always used i686 Fedora, even though the CPU supports x86_64. Recently I wanted to try out Mezzano in a virtual … <\/p>\ndnf download<\/code> and rpm --force<\/code> (and an rpm database rebuild) resulted in a still-working x86_64 Fedora 22 system, with no need to wipe the drive. I’m glad Roberto Ragusa took the time to write up those instructions, and I wanted to document that they roughly still apply, eight Fedora versions later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"