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I have migrated to Debian 10 recently and opted for netinstall.

I have two old computers that I repurposed as backup PC's which I am currently using.

PC Phenom

Phenom X4 9750 - DDR2 2GB - Nvidia 8200

PC Athlon

Athlon II X2 250 - DDR3 2GB - Gigabyte 210 Rev 5.0

I decided to make a Debian 10 installation for my Athlon PC by using my Phenom PC since my Athlon PC had a broken PSU that couldn't supply 12V through Molex/SATA power lines and I just didn't trust my USB 3.0 SATA adapter with a PC with an allready messed up PSU.

So I decided to connect my new HDD to the Phenom PC and install Debian 10 there. I successfully installed Debian 10 with XFCE using nonfree netinst cd but I am curious if it will work. When I used SparkyLinux with the Phenom PC lots of time ago. I kept getting "Couldn't find processor microcode" errors whenever I used apt and I am afraid of the same and similar things happening with this "Cross Installation". I couldn't even connect my new HDD to the Athlon PC since I did the installation and I am far from home and thus couldn't test my installation yet.

So In the end, Does "Cross Installing" Debian 10 make sense?

Delta Oscar Uniform
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1 Answers1

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Yes, it’s safe, in your circumstances. The bootloader and kernel installed by Debian aren’t tied to the hardware they’re installed on, other than the general architecture; and both i386 and amd64 would work on the two CPUs you’re using. The only thing to bear in mind is that your initramfs should be as generic as possible; so make sure that /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf’s MODULES line is MODULES=most.

Stephen Kitt
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