I finally got the NM Applet into a feature complete state and it’s been moved to kdereview.  This involved lots of sleep deprived nights to get it in on time.  I’ll be adding features frequently from now until I go on vacation on 16-May.  One necessary feature will be to implement automatic interface switching which will allow the applet to automatically connect to a wired interface when it’s plugged in and fallback on a wireless interface when the wired connection is removed.  These parameters will all be set in the profile manager that is accessible from the applet menu.

Now comes the tricky part . . . configuration. It’s easy to write a bunch of widgets that let you enter in a lot of data to configure your system. The problem is that it minimizes it’s use. in order to alleviate this I’m going to do two things.

1) I’ve created a widget that displays available Wireless Access Points on a 2-D view. The stronger signals are closer to a computer icon.

2) I’m going to create a menu that will allow you to go directly to scanning for Access Points and create a profile for you if you wish.

That will hopefully speed up the most common use cases. All the other methods of customizing your profile will be available on other widgets for those who wish to have it your way.

I now have an applet that displays the correct icon base on the connection state. The icons are rather ugly as they’re not designed to be displayed at their current size. I’m hoping someone on the artists team can make some new ones that will match the great icons for the rest of KDE.

I fixed all know bugs in the NM dataengine.  It can be found in svn playground.  I’ll now be able to move on to the applet where my first goal is for it to be able to mirror what knetworkmanager shows as a icon.  Afterwards I’ll move on to implementing profile based network management.  This represents a drastic departure from the previous version of knetworkmanager but I think it’s a much more intuitive interface that won’t require the user to know much about the under-lying hardware.

Did some more work on desktop icons. Not everyone was as big a fan as I was. Icons now align correctly regardless of size. I may eventually move this algorithm to include all applets within the Default Desktop containment.

I read on Aaron Siego’s blog that there had been a lot of requests for having traditional icons on the desktop under Plasma. I thought hey, that sounds like something easy that I can do real quick. Boy was I wrong. The Plasma::Icon and IconApplet were in serious disarray and suffering from bit-rot due to the numerous changes in Plasma since it was last maintained. With a lot of help from Marco Martin I’ve been able to get things looking good and hopefully things will look good and work right when KDE 4.0 is released.

I finished the Plasma DataEngine that lists devices available in Solid. It’s now feature complete and part of kdebase. I had a bit of trouble moving it from playground to kdebase mostly from my lack of understanding of subversion commands but I got it figured out without too much pain for the other users of the repository. Once the scripting bindings are available applet writers will be able to list all the devices in Solid using javascript. This will bring some pretty powerful features to applet writers and make device integration trivial.

I was able to get a release out of NetworkDaemon. I’ve made a lot of progress since the last release. It crashes less, which is always a plus. It has more capabilities as well such as command line options for debugging and killing the server, an interface which to allow different DHCP clients. Overall, I’m quite happy with the progress that I’ve made so far. Next I plan to add scanning capabilities for WAPs.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been hacking on networkdaemon. I’ve added several features including the ability to set a static IP address, change routes in the routing tables, and set DNS servers. Basically all the stuff that goes along with setting a static IP address. Currently I have: an interface for the ‘ifconfig’, ‘iwconfig’, ‘route’, and writing to resolv.conf. In short there’s been a lot of work done, now I just have to release it!

I’ve gotten commit access to KDE svn and merged my completed tutorials. I’ve started on the network manager part of Solid and gotten two done. I’ll publish it once the module is completed. They’re well received since, if nobody knows how to use Solid, nobody will use it. I plan to do a few more network manager tutorials to complete the module and then I’m going to get back to NetworkDaemon. Otherwise, when KDE4 comes out, we won’t have a network backend that works on BSD.