changing architecture from i386 to amd64

[Kirk Strauser]

On Friday 08 August 2008, Ivo Karabojkov wrote:

> I hope to be able to "switch" my architecture without re-installing
> FreeBSD with AMD64.

I went through this last week.  I use the 7.0 install disk to do an 
*upgrade* installation over the old one, booted into the new amd64 system, 
and upgraded kernel and world.

Next, I manually reinstalled databases/db47, lang/ruby18, 
databases/ruby-bdb, and ports-mgmt/portupgrade.  When that was done, I 
ran "portupgrade -fa" to recompile all the ports on my system.

The only gotchas I had were that Berkeley databases aren't portable from 
32-bit to 64-bit systems, and I used quite a few.  A word to the wise: dump 
PostgreSQL to a text file before the upgrade.
-- 
Kirk Strauser