A long overdue refresh

[whobutdrew]

Hello again, DW!

In the event nobody remembers me, a few years ago I jumped on the DWagon and started to build my own server. It was running just swimmingly during that time... until I went and tried to clean up unneeded packages. Now the system is buggered (though I do have backups!)

When I reached for my install disc, I realized that it was Ubuntu 9.04x32. I remember being told back then that DW wasn't quite ready for 9.1 or x64. I'm guessing that this has changed by now.

So what is the current best/supported version of Ubuntu server to use as the underlying OS? And is it x64 ready?

Glad to see you guys are still kicking!

Comments

[mark]

We don't really support 32 bit systems. And I recommend 10.04. Newer should be fine.

[foxfirefey]

I use "Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS x86_64" for my dev environment and it works pretty well. DW supports x64 much more readily than x32--I'm not sure if we ever made it work all the way on x32.

[pauamma]

Don't think we did - http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1632 looks incomplete to me. (Also, I'm easily amused by the bug#, considering what it's about.)

[whobutdrew]

Guess I'm not remembering correctly. I'm shocked.

As restoring from backup hasn't been going as smoothly as I'd hoped (they never do) my plan is to get it back to a working state, then try and step through distro updates via do-release-update.

Of course, if that fails, I'll do a clean install of 12.04x64 and import what I can of my existing data. Should that be the way that things must flow, any major changes to the wiki in terms of installation that I should watch for?

[pauamma]

Should that be the way that things must flow, any major changes to the wiki in terms of installation that I should watch for?

Not that I can think of offhand, but your aside about restoring may of course be applicable here as well. (In which case, we of course want to hear about it.)

[exor674]

Aren't there issues ( read: don't ) with switching from 32-bit to 64-bit?

[whobutdrew]

Oh I know that they are very different! I had a 10.10 disc available, to I did a fresh install of that and am setting it up for DW right now. If I can copy over my original mysql files and have it work, I'll step through the x86 distros as far as I can, make a dd backup, then try to start fresh with 12.04x64.

[exor674]

I mean with the Dreamwidth codebase. I recall a few of the 32-bit support stuff was "Enabling this commits you to using this forever ( unless you take the time to fix things )"

[pauamma]

Yeah, you can't switch from one to the other without some serious database surgery, or mix 32-bit and 64-bit across DW components, if they're on different servers or VPS.

[whobutdrew]

Ah well, I'll just stick with x86 until somethiing compels the switch, then. Thanks for the heads up and all of the help.