Can I run 18.04?

Support & Help Requests Hardware
#1

Hi All

Not sure this is exactly the right area, but I'll give it a shot.

I have 16.04.4 LTS on a fairly old Dell Studio 17. Now 18.04 is out I wondered about upgrading. I've not received any notifications from the OS even though I have "new LTS" notification set, then I remembered that it was probably because the laptop is 32 bit.

Support for 32 bit has ended right? So I will have to stick with 16.04?

The reason I'm a little confused right now is that my system specs have this:

specs.png786Ă—441 54.1 KB

which says that my processor supports 32 bit and 64 bit.

So, would it be possible to run 18.04 or am I misunderstanding what this means?

Many thanks in advance.

Martin

#2

32 bit is still supported but for some reason, the Update Manager doesn’t show the upgrade to 18.04 for a lot of people. It can be forced manually, though. You can try the following command in a terminal:

update-manager -cd

Anyway, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to reinstall the 64 bit version as your CPU supports it. There’s no real reason to stick with 32 bit unless you’re really short on RAM. You can’t upgrade from 32 to 64 bit, though, you’d have to do a full reinstall.

#3

Ah, thank you @terzag, I shall download the 64 bit version and give it a try. I’m sure I read somewhere that 32 bit support was ending, but maybe that is planned for further in the future.

#4

I’ve just checked your laptop model and it seems to have 2 GB of RAM. In that case, maybe it would be better to stick with 32 bit. Really not sure about it.

In any case, I don’t think that dropping 32 bit support is planned in the near future. Some distros have dropped support for some x86 CPUs but it only concerns really old models that are 20 years old or so.

On the other side, some softwares have started to drop support for 32 bit. E.g. Google Chrome only has a 64 bit version. It’ll happen more and more in the future and while with opensource software you can usually compile it yourself if needed, it’s not exactly something you’d want to do a lot.

#5

Thanks. I have just checked and the laptop shows as having 4 GB of RAM, the actual model number is Studio 1737 so maybe this one had a better spec, although maybe I put it in, my memory fails me. So I imagine 64 bit would be better?

#6

I have a 32bit netbook with 1Gb RAM
According to the report of MATE System Monitor utility - 18.04 also takes approximately the same ammount of RAM as 16.04

#7

In that case, yeah, go with 64 bit.

Don’t forget to backup your important files and settings, as reinstallation will wipe your hard drive.

#8

Sure, although this is a relatively new install anyway, after finding the laptop in a cupboard after some time! :slight_smile: So not too much on it at the moment anyway. But, yes. I will move the small amount of things I have over to a thumb drive I have.

Thanks for your help.

#9

default Ubuntu dropped 32 bit images I believe, but UM has not, I think the support for 32 bit architecture is still there as thats in the kernel, but default Ubuntu is building installable images for 32 bit machines any more, but thing I have found as long as you have a processor that run 64 bit you’re good, I have a Pentium 4 processor i686 that runs 64 bit OSes all the time

#10

default Ubuntu dropped 32 bit images I believe

Yeah, they dropped the 32 bit desktop images but it’s still installable using the minimal or netinstall images. And upgrades from a previous version still work. Besides, it’s only the main Ubuntu version, other flavors like Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu… still offer 32 bit images.

#11

Typing this from my new shiny 64 bit 18.04 MATE installation. Working well and liking what I see so far.

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#12

It’s possible some Ubuntu flavours may consider dropping i386 in the near future. However, i386 will definitely stick around for 3 years with 18.04.

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