Looking for suggestions on migrating from x86 to AMD64

[IWBCMAN]

Last week my desktop computer(2.4Ghz Celeron w/768MB RDRAM) got up and died on me. It was a sad day, then came the obituary and the funeral and dressing in black for 7 days. Before my old desktop died I managed to get rockhopper gcc4.1Beta installed on him and was running GNOME 2.13.x.

After the period of mourning passed I resovled myself to resurrecting a new and much improved desktop.
He(der computer/der Rechner) now looks like this:

Asrock-939Dual Sata2- ie. a 939 pin ATX mobo with AGP AND PCIx16 (allowing me to reuse my GeForce 5700LX)
Manchester AMD64+ X2 3800
1 GB OCZ DDR-400 CL2.5


Now I have done a lot of research before making this decision-I have read hundreds of forum posts, googled for hours, did feature comparisons etc.

I have come to the conclusion that at first I would simply like to run the new machine 32bit mode and ignore for the time being that I have 64 bits at my disposal...

So my first question is this:

Can I boot with a liveCD (newest Kantonix supports kernel 2.6.15 which includes all the drivers for my new mobo), chroot into my old(20 days) dead Rockhopper install, recompile the kernel with IA32_EMULATION on, changing the Processor type, Chipset(IDE), Network and Alsa config and reboot the machine to get a functioning 32bit installation for my new machine ? (NOTE that entire system was compiled with i686)


If this works I would then start to do a proper 64bit install only using 32bit emulation where necessary. Which leads me to my next question:

If I were to do a new 64bit install on a new partion installing the same apps/libs with same versions as I have on my rockhopper partition can I use the 32bit apps(firefox etc.) from that rockhopper install in the new 64bit install ? ie. I have read up on the multilib issues and how to do a chroot 32 environment-ideally because I already have a 32 bit environment I would simply like to reuse it to whatever extent is possible....


Any feedback, suggestions etc. would be appreciated...

thanks for helping...

[avendesora]

I wouldn't try the 64bit kernel with 32bit /. Should work, but I don't see the point, really.
Just build a brand new 64bit gentoo in a spare partition following the standard amd64 install guide.
Once its done, you can chroot to your 32bit install and use the apps there if you don't find what you
need in 64bit variant.

[avieth]

My only advice:

Get used to unmasking packages.