Tricky question (Answered)

[bicol_willem]

Here walks in a friend of mine, running PCLinuyOS 32 bit, with a question.
We all know that if Linux would get borked (very unlikely) or needs a update via a fresh install, it is easy to leave /home untouched (going out from a rather standard install with swap, /, and /home).
But his question was: Can I upgrade to 64 bit from 32 bit and leave /home untouched as well?

I got to tell you guys .... I don´t know! Never tried or even thought about that option.

Anyone?

[gseaman]

Don't even think about it! 

Seriously, save documents, pictures, media, etc. and the browser and email folders and start clean. The number of potential problems is great, and the time required to troubleshoot them could be very high.

Galen

[Old-Polack]

Here walks in a friend of mine, running PCLinuyOS 32 bit, with a question.
We all know that if Linux would get borked (very unlikely) or needs a update via a fresh install, it is easy to leave /home untouched (going out from a rather standard install with swap, /, and /home).
But his question was: Can I upgrade to 64 bit from 32 bit and leave /home untouched as well?

I got to tell you guys .... I don´t know! Never tried or even thought about that option.

Anyone?

For what it's worth, I don't usually have a separate /home partition, but when I installed the first 64bit test image, I just copied my /home/polack directory from my 32bit installation to the 64bit one, and had no problems. A few of the icons on the desktop didn't have applications installed yet, so appeared as white squares with an X in them. After installing the proper applications I right clicked the icons, selected properties, then closed the properties window, without doing anything else, and the proper icons appeared, and the applications launced when the icons were clicked.

My current 64 bit /home/polack directory is a direct descendant of that original copy. All my browser bookmarks are still intact, as are my pidgin buddy lists, etc. I very much doubt that mounting the 32bit /home partition on the 63bit installation would give much different results.

[Old-Polack]

Don't even think about it! 

Seriously, save documents, pictures, media, etc. and the browser and email folders and start clean. The number of potential problems is great, and the time required to troubleshoot them could be very high.

Galen

Read the post above. I though about it, and then did it, without any serious side effects.

[gseaman]

I humbly admit that I was wr ... wro ... wron ... 

I have packaged a few libraries that had different versions on 32 and 64-bit, and I assumed some config files counted on specific libraries, which could be a mess. I knew mozilla apps are carefully designed for portability of the configs. But I did not know that for most apps (maybe all apps), user config files don't have any settings that are version dependent.

Galen

[Old-Polack]

I humbly admit that I was wr ... wro ... wron ...  

I have packaged a few libraries that had different versions on 32 and 64-bit, and I assumed some config files counted on specific libraries, which could be a mess. I knew mozilla apps are carefully designed for portability of the configs. But I did not know that for most apps (maybe all apps), user config files don't have any settings that are version dependent.

Galen

A while back, even minor version changes sometimes caused major problems with upgrades of the same distribution, due to totally different configuration files being used between different versions of the same application, so keeping the same /home partition was a pretty iffy proposition. People screamed, and developers heard, and for the most part, config files became reusable through many upgrades and also between distributions. I'm sure there are still some left that may cause problems, but they are now a rarity. I haven't personally run into any for quite a few years.

Come to think of it, I did the same thing between my old KDE 3.5.10 installation and the first KDE 4.x.x  installation. I renamed the ~/.kde directory to ~/kde-old, just to be sure, and just copied the whole /home/polack directory to the new installation. I then moved the individual config files and/or application directories from ~/.kde-old to the ~/.kde4 directory for those items like konqueror that had bookmarks and such that I wanted to retain. All of the stuff in the .files and .directories outside of the .kde4 directory just continued to work as it always had.

[bicol_willem]

Thanks guys, got the answer!