Getting new hardware, should I reinstall?

Jenden · n00b Joined: 14 Nov 2004 Posts: 59

I'm currently running Gentoo (2.6.11-nitro2) on an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ with an MSI K7NDelta2 mobo and GForce4 ti-4200 video card (as well as some other miscellaneous hardware, not sure the rest is really relevent though). I'm looking to upgrade soon (soon being a couple months most likely, but just doing some research now) and I'm wondering if I should go ahead and reinstall since it will be a fairly major hardware upgrade. Planning on moving to an AMD64 (not sure exactly which one yet), a new MSI mobo (most likely nforce chipset), and a new GForce 6 series most likely. Its the change to a 64 bit processor that makes me think it would probably be best to just reinstall, but I'm looking for some more experienced opinions.

diastelo · Guru Joined: 23 Feb 2004 Posts: 521

Getting a new video card is no big deal when it comes to kernel compilation, nor is a new motherboard. A few small changes to your kernel configuration will take care of both. However, if you were planning on actually running 64 bit applications with your new AMD64 cpu, definitely think about reinstalling. The amount of work it would take to recompile everything on your system isn't usually worth it, but you'll be doing it anyway if you want to switch from x86 to amd64.

On the other hand, you aren't required to switch to 64 bit immediately. You can continue to use x86 with your new cpu, if you so wish, but you will not benefit, of course, from any optimizations.
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stevyn · n00b Joined: 26 Aug 2004 Posts: 70 Location: USA

If you can run the system with AMD64, then I'd do it. First figure out what you need to change in the kernel to get the motherboard and graphics card working. Then find some time (maybe a day or two on a processor that fast?) and run emerge -e world to recompile all of your packages. Make sure you change your make.conf file of course. I think you'd end up spending more time reconfiguring your system than doing it this way. Of course, I'd also research this a little to make sure you can do what I described.

dark_glaive · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:05 am Post subject:

You'll have to do a reinstall to go 64-bit. If you don't really care about 64-bit stuff at this point, don't recompile and just change your kernel to reflect your new hardware. You'll be good to go. I used a system compiled for an athlon thunderbird on my AMD64 chip when I first got it, and everything worked great.
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