-<p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
-see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
-have been discovered and reported in the process
-(<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
-<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
-enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
-kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
-am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
-
-<p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
-Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
-it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
-script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
-desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
-(only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
-
-<p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
-currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
-in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
-is created. The bug report
-<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
-this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
-to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
-hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
-do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
-<a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
-issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
-maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
-working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
-udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
-upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
-documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
-Debian Squeeze.</p>
-
-<p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
-script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
-trick:</p>
-
-<blockquote><pre>
-#!/bin/sh
-set -ex
-
-if [ "$1" ] ; then
- desktop=$1
-else
- desktop=gnome
-fi
-
-from=lenny
-to=squeeze
-
-exec &lt; /dev/null
-unset LANG
-mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
-tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
-fuser -mv .
-debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
-chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
-cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
-#!/bin/sh
-exit 101
-EOF
-chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
-exit_cleanup() {
- umount $tmpdir/proc
-}
-mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
-# Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
-trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
-
-chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
-
-# Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
-# to return the correct answers.
-echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
- chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
-
-# Include the desktop and laptop task
-for test in desktop laptop ; do
- echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
-#!/bin/sh
-exit 2
-EOF
- chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
-done
-
-DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
-DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
-export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
-chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
-
-echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
-chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
-touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
-chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
-fuser -mv
-</pre></blockquote>
-
-<p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
-with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
-differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
-regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
-work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
-kdebase-workspace-data</p>
-
-<p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
-(KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
-post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
-aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
-remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
-KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
-193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
-
-<p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
-is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
-booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
-packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
-upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
-packages.</p>
+<p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few
+days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
+aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
+that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
+It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
+allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had
+positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
+browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
+cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
+compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
+libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
+drive around.</p>
+
+<p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
+controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+use Spykee;
+Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
+my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
+my $spykee = Spykee->new();
+$spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
+$spykee->left();
+sleep 2;
+$spykee->right();
+sleep 2;
+$spykee->forward();
+sleep 2;
+$spykee->back();
+sleep 2;
+$spykee->stop();
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
+peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
+implement the protocol used by the robot. I've implemented several of
+the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
+support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I
+want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
+the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
+without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
+so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
+going. :).</p>
+
+<p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
+where to make it available first. I will add a link to
+<a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
+those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
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