Last week, we (RedHat guys, but mostly Daniel Vrátil) hosted KDE PIM Sprint here in Brno and this was a great opportunity for other hackers/friends to join us earlier and hack on Solid. I was working mainly with Lukáš Tinkl on libmm-qt (Qt library for ModemManager), which has now full support of ModemManager 1.0. We made some changes even in plasma-nm, but mostly bugfixes and we improved support for displays with high resolution. Another thing that was going on over the past week was usability study (thanks to Björn Balazs) and you can still tell us your opinions and vote for Björn’s ideas, because we really want to make plasma-nm better. We also discussed usability with Thomas Pfeiffer on the PIM Sprint and I hope you will like the result, but I will write about it later when we have some demo so we can get some criticism :).

We also released a new version of our “networkmanagement compilation” including plasma-nm, libmm-qt and libnm-qt and we decided to follow versions of NetworkManager and ModemManager to make it less confusing.

• libmm-qt 1.0.0 – has full support of ModemManager 1.0
• libnm-qt 0.9.8.0 – has full support of NetworkManager 0.9.8 and this version is only compilable with the new libmm-qt
• plasma-nm 0.9.3.2 – with a lot of bugfixes and improved support for HDPI displays

It’s now quite confusing which versions of libmm-qt and libnm-qt you need, because we have two stable releases of libmm-qt and libnm-qt, but it’s pretty simple. If your distribution has ModemManager 1.0, you need the new versions (libmm-qt 1.0.0 and libnm-qt 0.9.8), if your distribution has ModemManager < 1.0, use previously released versions (libmm-qt 0.5.1 and libnm-qt 0.9.0.1).

Just a small announcement that we are releasing a second version of our new networkmanagement applet.

Here is a list with changes in this version:

• plasma-nm is renamed to match the names from the old networkmanagement applet (kded module, applet name etc.)
• visual changes (different icons, improved speed of animations, applet is a little bit smaller)
• improved notifications 
• experimental support for ModemManager 1.0 (must be compiled with libmm-qt and libnm-qt from git using master branches)
• ModemManager support is optional
• StrongSwan VPN plugin

And some closed bugs:

• #325783 – plasma-nm doesn’t install icon network-defaultroute, which is need by kde-nm-connection-editor.desktop
• #324016 – plasma crashes when a vpn connection is activated
• #324708 – Crash when launching second user desktop
• #325290 – Cannot add static routes on OpenVPN connections using the latest plasma-nm in Kubuntu Saucy
• #322192 – WPA2 dialog blocks Plasma

We also released a small bugfix release for NetworkManagerQt [2], which is needed for this version of plasma-nm. ModemManagerQt [3] doesn’t have new release and you can use the previously released version. If you want to compile plasma-nm with the new ModemManager 1.0 support (mostly necessary for new distributions like Fedora 20, OpenSuse 12.3, Archlinux etc.), you have to compile NetworkManagerQt [4] and ModemManagerQt [5] from git using master branches.

[1] – http://download.kde.org/unstable/plasma-nm/plasma-nm-0.9.3.1.tar.xz.mirrorlist
[2] – http://download.kde.org/unstable/networkmanager-qt/0.9.0.1/src/libnm-qt-0.9.0.1.tar.xz.mirrorlist
[3] – http://download.kde.org/unstable/modemmanager-qt/0.5.1/src/libmm-qt-0.5.1.tar.xz.mirrorlist
[4] – http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=libnm-qt.git
[5] – http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=libmm-qt.git