Linux Mint Forums

One of the reasons I have remained with 32 bit operating systems for so long is that I make daily use of a chroot environment to update 3 out of my 4 distros. This saves an awful lot of time and good deal of wear on tear on my hard drive by reducing the number of reboots I have to carry out. This technique is something that I do not want to give up on. The trouble is that whilst it is very easy to chroot from a 64bit distro into a 32 bit one, it is next to impossible the other way around, and that is what I would need to do because LMDE - my main distro - is 32 bit and likely to remain so for the forseeable future.

I have googled this of course, and I have found several explanations as to how people have achieved this seeming impossibility, but they are so horrendously complicated they make my brain hurt. Most of the explanations I have seen seem to revolve around trying to get gui programs like Firefox or Wine running through chroot and this may be why they are so difficult to follow. I don't want to do any of that, all I want to run is 2 commands "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade".

So the question is, as my needs are so simple, is there a simple way to achieve them? Or do I go on using 32 bit until my computer breaks and it is time to buy a new one?

I googled and couldn't find any of the links you seem to have found. If you can post any of them here I'll take a look and see if I can make enough sense of them to condense them to essentials for what you need.

That is a kind offer Roken, but I didn't actually save any of those links, and most of them were considerably out of date anyway so probably no longer relevant. Thanks all the same.

I really don't feel I am missing out on anything by having 32 bit distros, I have tried a mixture of 64 and 32 bit in the past and only saw negative effects really, the chroot thing being the main one, the other being that I have to download two versions of every program I install, one for each architecture.

If there really isn't a simple way to do this I will just stick with 32 bit until I buy a new machine then I can install all 64 bit distros onto it and the problem will have gone away.

The other way is to install a 64 bit version of LMDE which will automatically chroot to the other 32 bit ones. The trouble with that is that my LMDE is so heavily tweaked to my liking that recreating it would be a nightmare - something for those long winter nights maybe, but not the summer