Upgrade Ubuntu Karmic Koala from 32bit to 64bit with encrypted /home

I was deciding if I wanted to take advantage of running on a 64bit kernel on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, and I really had no reason to stick with 32bit. 64bit allows better performance, and has been reported to be as stable as 32bit while being faster.

I have been hesitant about upgrading in the past to 64bit for a number of reasons:  application support, driver support, flash support, etc.  Doing some reading lately (here, and here), I decided it’s time to leave 32bit in the dust and jump on the 64bit bandwagon.  If my hardware supports it, why not?

The next question I had was with my encrypted /home partition.  Is it as easy as reinstalling with the same options (read on, you’ll find out!)?  Will I have to copy my data elsewhere and copy back over when I’m done?  Can I upgrade in-place or do I have to reinstall entirely?  Is my laptop going to asplode?

My partitioning is as follows:

Screenshot--dev-sda - GParted

I was concerned about not having 64bit Karmic Koala pick-up/use my encrypted home directory automatically on login.  I decided to throw up a virtual machine of Karmic with the /home on a separate partition and used the encryption option on the user-creation box.  I then reinstalled the 64bit version on top of that using the same /home mountpoint, formatting the / mountpoint, installed with the same encryption option selected, and checked to see that a document that I had created on the Desktop was still there.  Lo-and-behold (where did that saying come from, anyway?) I had success!  The only thing left to do was the actual upgrade.

Before you start, make sure you have a proper backup of your data.  There’s the steps I used:

• Downloaded the 64bit ISO and installed that to my USB drive
• Booted from the USB drive
• Formatted /dev/sda1 as ext4 and set mountpoint as /, used /dev/sda5 as ext4 and set mountpoint /home (do not format this)
• Used the same username, password, checked the “automatically decrypt” option on the user creation form
• Install!

I logged in and all of my settings and data were there as expected.  I only had to reinstall some programs that aren’t installed by default that I use, (chromium-browser, skype, etc).   Also, I am a good boy and have a backup of my home directory (which I can discuss in a later post) just in case it went bad.

I can now ride the wave of the future (with style) on 64bit Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala! I hope this may be of use for some people.