What is meant by cross-grading? What are the pre-requisites and risks involved?

This page is meant to document the procedure for cross-grading a Debian install using Multiarch.

The first Debian release to feature Multiarch is Wheezy, so you will need to upgrade before attempting the procedure described here.

A full backup is also strongly recommended as this procedure is still very much work in progress. Reinstalling is still the safer option. You have been warned!

These are the steps for converting an i386 install to amd64, but they should be applicable for any other architecture pairs if your machine can run both (e.g. armel and armhf).

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