Jan Grulich

Status and plans for plasma-nm

Current status

It has been more than 3 months since we started writing a new plasma applet for NetworkManager. Now we are getting closer to have a properly working applet and connection editor for NetworkManager in KDE. Since the last blogpost there are not many big changes but there are a lot of  bugfixes and small improvements, the only one big change is that we implemented the rest of VPN plugins. It’s the time when we would like to release some alpha version or something like that to get users know that plasma-nm is usable and we want some feedback, reported bugs etc. to make it even better. Current maintainer of the old applet and libmm-qt/libnm-qt libraries is going to make a release of these libraries at Akademy so we can release it together and probably deprecate the old applet.  For those who have not seen our applet, there are a couple of screenshots:

nm1nm2nm3

If you like it, you can find packages with plasma-nm in some distributions. We have packages for Fedora (provided by me) and as I know also Arch, Gentoo, OpenSuse should have plasma-nm in their repositories. If your distribution doesn’t have plasma-nm packaged you can compile it from sources. You will find more information about compilation and links to sources in the previous blogpost. You can report your problems to KDE Bugzilla.

Plasma active

Well, there is one big news about plasma-nm. Due to the fact that my proposal for GSoC was accepted, I’ll start working on customizing plasma-nm for PA. The current applet for NetworkManager in PA is not much usable for touch devices and even our plasma-nm is not much better so I decided to come with something better. I’m also planning make some PA setting module to allow you to configure some basic things like in Android or in iOS, because for PA running on touch device you won’t use a lot of things we have in the editor from plasma-nm. Finally I have working Plasma active on my Nexus 7, but it has quite annoying issues and I was not able to make it work with MultiBoot to have Android and PA on the same device so I had to replace my Android with PA. Here is a couple of screenshots of plasma-nm running on Nexus 7 with PA:

snapshvhv IMG_20130614_135227

Akademy 2013

And the last thing and the most exciting for me is that I will attend Akademy 2013. It will be my first Akademy and even my first flight and visit Spain. I have booked a flight and hostel so I hope nothing won’t stop me.

See you in Bilbao

Ak2013Badge2

 

12 thoughts on “Status and plans for plasma-nm

  1. The old applet and libmm-qt/libnm-qt libraries you are talking about is the work of Lamarque Souza, right? (Sorry if this was made clear in a previous post)

      1. Yeah, right. I didn’t want to lessen the role of the any contributor. Sorry about that. My focus on Lamarque’s work as the maintainer simply results from noticing his blog posts on planetkde.

  2. Nice work!
    Is the problem with passwords migration going to be solved by 4.11 release, or are users supposed to re-enter all the wi-fi passwords manually? The way of wi-fi paswords storage in kwallet is rather clear, but not user-friendly, so it would be better to do some automatic migration.

    1. I just tried it out (on Arch) and didn’t need to re-enter my wi-fi passwords.

      So far it’s working fine although there are a couple of small visual glitches.

      1. Hmm, maybe because you are running kded4 modul from the old networkmanagement applet which provides passwords as well. I think I could create some migration tool for recovering your passwords from the old applet. Btw. could you please report all your problems (visual glitches)? Thanks

  3. Great to hear about your progress! And I’m especially happy that you’re working on an Active version!
    The only thing that strikes me as slighty weird in the screenshots is that there is both “active connections” and “connected to”, showing the same connection. Isn’t that a bit redundant?

    1. The “Connected to…” part is kind of a status bar, it stays fixed to the bottom of the applet while the rest can be freely scrolled: handy when you have many wifis around

  4. Usability wise it is a huge improvement but it is still far from what you can find in other platforms, specially having the main action (connect) as a small button and the connection editor, but it is a huge step forward.

    1. Well bit a bit, we all agree this is already a huge step in the right direction, once everything is working we can try to improve ux.

  5. Can you send me the link of the Arch package, or AUR if you can find it?

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