Ubuntu... downgrade? (64-bit -> 32-bit)

[Mark Komarinski]

On 1/25/2011 9:57 PM, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
> I'm afraid I've fallen into the portable device rage, e.g., my Droid-X.
> Nifty thing, it is -- even set it up with VPN, SIP through my job, and all
> sorts of other fun stuff.  Now I'd like to play video from my server on
> the phone.  Unfortunately, its media player is pretty useless -- far
> better to generate video from the server, and stream it, apparently.  But!
>   64-bit CODECs are also kinda lousy.  And it's not like I have a oodles of
> RAM -- 2 GB -- so dropping to a 32-bit system won't really harm anything.
Using 64-bit doesn't get you a lot if you only have 2GB, but memory is 
cheap and you should be able to upgrade to 4GB+ pretty inexpensively.
> But Googling that doesn't really help much.  Any suggestions?  What I'd
> *love* to do is an "apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade", and be done with
> it.  Somehow, though, I'm thinking it won't be that simple.  I'd really
> like to avoid a full re-install -- a lot of configuration has gone into
> this silly thing, and, while I could backup /etc and pray that was enough,
> I'd prefer not to find out the hard way.

What are you using for streaming?  Even though my system is Debian 
running x86_64, I haven't had a problem finding libraries.  I ask mostly 
because I'd like to do the same thing with my Droid.  I haven't found a 
good app to do so yet.

Depending on the application you use and libraries you require, if you 
can find the application and and ia32 libraries the app needs, you can 
certainly run it on a 64-bit system.  I've done this before (again, on a 
Debian system) as you can get the ia32 versions of libraries, extract 
the libraries from the .deb, and install them by hand.  I'd have to look 
at my notes to see what the rest of the process was, but I remember it 
was pretty straightforward after that.

-Mark