Dear Diary: The Eternal Ramblings of Trevor Watson

I am indebted to Chris for pointing me in the direction of the Solaris Live Upgrade feature to update my system rather than copying 2.3GB of DVD image and burning a DVD. The great thing about Live Upgrade is that you can retain your existing Solaris install whilst building a new copy, thus allowing you to switch between the two easily.

I'd heard of Live Upgrade before, but only in passing, so there was a bit of a learning curve required. However, it turned out to be very simple, and the only slow part was performing the actual upgrade over a 1Mb ADSL link to Sun from my home.

I followed the instructions here [docs.sun.com] and have to say that they were very useful, although there was a bit of jumping about between pages to get all of the information I needed. So, here, in summary is what I did:

1. Create a new partition (slice) on my disk to take the new OS image. In this case, it was slice 4 of my single 72GB disk, and I made it approx 10GB
2. lucreate -m /:/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s4:ufs -n solaris10

   This copies the existing system onto the new partition and names it "solaris10"

3. Upgrade the live upgrade packages to their respective Solaris 10 versions:
   • pkgrm SUNWluu SUNWlur
   • pkgadd -d /net/install-server/export/install/sparc/os/10/latest/Solaris_10/Product SUNWlur SUNWluu
4. luupgrade -u -n solaris10 -s /net/install-server/export/install/sparc/os/10/latest
5. luactivate solaris10
6. shutdown -y -g0 -i0

Then just type 'boot' at the OK prompt (on a SPARC workstation) and the system boots the Solaris 10 image.

I'm now running on Solaris 10 JDS rather than Solaris 9 and Gnome 2.0. Some of my Gnome configuration information failed to be read by JDS, so I'm having to change preferences on the fly and add launchers back into the panels, but all in all, everything went very smoothly.

A text file showing all of the output from the upgrade process is here.

This morning, my wife asked my if I was going running tonight.

After I'd said "yes", she said something to the effect that since we are having (fresh) pasta with our meal tonight (a rough approximation to a bolognese), we should all eat together as the kids can't wait 'til 7pm, and it would save a lot of messing about.

Now, that last part is critical. Normally, when we have the same meat dish with rice or the dried pasta you get in packets, she simply takes a bit out for the kids at their mealtime, but leaves the meat simmering until we're ready to eat. Rice takes 10-15mins to cook and packet pasta 8-10. This is easy and only involves popping another pan on for us for the extra 10-15 minutes for our rice/pasta.

The thing I don't get is that we are cooking fresh pasta tonight. It only takes 2 minutes to cook. There is the same amount of "messing about" as when we're using packet pasta or rice, but critically, less time involved.

Is it just me, or is there something rather peculiar about her logic here ?