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Ubuntu 9.10 lpia to 10.4 x86 Upgrade

Apr 22, 2010

Cannonical decided that the Ubuntu 10.4 Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu (known as Lucid) would drop support for the LPIA platform.  LPIA is a similar but different platform from i386 which allows for small amounts of CPU power reduction with LPIA built binaries.

Staying on Karmic forever is barely an option for LPIA users.  The only options are to either switch to an LPIA based build (and rely on a 3rd party for binaries), to switch to a different platform (for example, Gentoo can still do LPIA) or to upgrade to the i386 platform binaries.  If an Ubuntu LPIA project even existed as an option (something I'm not presently aware of) it wouldn't be Cannonical sponsored and would likely be a hobby project with support even harder to find.  I've done the Gentoo route before but the compiling piece requires too much time.  As a result, I've standarized on Ubuntu.  I'd rather sacrifice the small battery savings and move to i386 on my lightly used netbook to stay with Ubuntu.

None of what I've written here is technically supported.  The steps are borrowed/itemized from the Kubuntu wiki and are posted here to help others who might need to follow the same steps. These are my steps to attempt moving to a i386 based Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid) install from my Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) install.

  • Backup everything – migrating this way is unsupported so be prepared in case of failure
  • Add a line to /etc/apt/sources.list that points to the i386 lucid binaries:
  • Next, create the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01architecture containing the following text
    • APT::Architecture "i386";
  • Determine your dpkg version.  The following command should give you a close enough version number (for some reason dpkg reported slightly differently than aptitude for me):
    • dpkg –version
  • Download the i386 dpkg version that corresponded to your lpia version and install it with dpkg. In my case, I downloaded the files from the karmic repository as I needed a version close to 1.15.4ubuntu1.
  • Verify your new dpkg version (should return i386):
    • dpkg --print-architecture 
  • Update the dpkg database status file in /var/lib/dpkg/status so it references i386.  The following command will make the necessary changes:
    • sudo sed -i -e "s/^Architecture: lpia/Package-Architecture: lpia/" -e "s/^Architecture: i386/Package-Architecture: i386/" /var/lib/dpkg/status
  • Verify the database migration worked successfully.  A status check failed error indicates a problem (run apt-get -qq check for details on why):
    • sudo apt-get -qq check || ! echo "status check failed" && sudo apt-get -qq update
  • Update and upgrade Ubuntu!
    • aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade

These steps work as i386 and lpia are very similar (lpia processors can run i386 binaries, however i386 processors cannot run lpia binaries).  As packages are upgraded, their lpia built versions will be replaced with the i386 versions thereby allowing you to upgrade and removing lpia.  The official method to perform the above steps is to do a full reinstall of Ubuntu (migrating your data manually).  After the above, I had to safe-upgrade twice and then do a full-upgrade and manually remove conflicting packages (this is due to large changes with the subsystem - plymouth for one required a few manual deletions to get installed).

 

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