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:

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:

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

At first I have to say that the solid sprint was really awesome and it was really nice to meet all of the guys there. At the solid sprint we’ve discussed a lot of thing about plasma-nm and especially with Lamarque Souza, because he is a real master of KDE network management and he really helped us and gave us a lot of comments what we should improve. We also discussed my proposal for GSoC where my idea is to modify plasma-nm for Plasma Active.  During the solid sprint I started working on support of multiple devices of the same kind because I didn’t have opportunity to try our applet with two wireless cards until the solid sprint. Lukáš Tinkl added PIN dialog for unlocking modem devices and he improved bluetooth support. Our expert on QML in RedHat Daniel Vrátil helped me with the animation showing the details and now this animation is really smooth.  I think that’s enough of the news from the solid sprint but I have to say that this sprint was very beneficial for plasma-nm.

Now I would like to show you quick review what we have done in plasma-nm during the last month:

1) KWallet support

Finally we added support for storing your secrets into KWallet. All what you have to do for that is uncheck “All users may connect to this network” in the General tab in the connection editor. It means that this connection won’t be marked as system connection and secrets of this connection will be stored in KWallet. I can not forget to Daniel Nicoletti because he helped a lot with the KWallet support and with the secret agent.

2) Traffic monitor

The second thing which a lot of you wanted in plasma-nm was traffic monitor. Well you’re welcome 🙂

3) Better mobile broadband support

We’ve ported wizard for creating mobile broadband connections so you can finally create a new mobile connections in plasma-nm. I added some details informations for mobile broadband connections and as I said before,  Lukáš Tinkl added support for unlocking modem devices at the solid sprint

4) VPN support

Well, we have only support for VPNC now (and the most of you maybe know why, because we use VPNC in RedHat), but it should be easy to implement the rest of vpn plugins

5) Details settings

This settings was implemented very recently and I have to admit that I don’t like the GUI that I’ve created, but it’s the only solution for this setting I was able to make it work. Here you can specify what details you want to show for your connections.

6) Distribution of available connections to the categories

And the last thing is that we have three categories in the list of available connections. Your connections are now devided to active connections, previous connections and uknown connections and each category can be simply hidden.

7) And a lot of small improvements and bugfixes

If you want to try it you will have to compile libmm-qt [1], then libnm-qt [2] and then you can try to compile our plasma-nm [3]. But please note that this is not a stable version and some things might be broken or not work properly.

[1] http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=libmm-qt.git

[2] http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=libnm-qt.git

[3] http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=plasma-nm.git

Here you can see the video uploaded ~2 weeks ago

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVKjwFfF-PQ]

Hi,

I’d like to show you what we are doing for network management in KDE. With Lukáš Tinkl we started to write a new plasma applet for managing your network connections. It’s a long road to have some stable release or something for daily usage, but we have already wired and wireless connections and some basic functionality for other connection types. The entire applet is written in QML except for C++ model and some classes for working with NetworkManager. For that purpose we are using libnm-qt library which is Qt library for NetworkManager. We are also working on a new connection editor which will be as a standalone application. This editor uses some components from the old Plasma NM applet but it’s redone to use libnm-qt library.

If you want to try it, you can get it from our git repository git://anongit.kde.org/plasma-nm.git and you should disable the kded module from the old Plasma NM applet but we are not supporting secrets for VPN connections for now.

You will have to also compile libmm-qt git://anongit.kde.org/libmm-qt.git and libnm-qt (settings branch) git://anongit.kde.org/libnm-qt.git

And please note that this is not a stable version and a lot of functionality is missing. There is also one problem with secrets, because the old Plasma NM applet stores secrets into KWallet and there are “agent owned”. We are storing secrets into the NetworkManager and when your secrets are “agent owned”, there will be problem with getting them from NetworkManager. For that you will have to edit your connection with our new editor or create them from nm-connection-editor (from NetworkManager). But it can be used together with the old Plasma NM for now if you want to have full functionality of getting secrets.

Here is a video of the plasma-nm in action

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7zif8GoHU&w=420&h=315]

And picture how will look the new editor