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Monday, June 7, 2010

Plasma Network Management and ModemManager

Well, new update, this time I have implemented org.freedesktop.ModemManager.Modem and org.freedesktop.ModemManager.Modem.Gsm.Card interfaces from specification and added some information it provides to the interface details tab:



There is more information to add to interface details tab, I have not done it yet because of lack of time. The ModemManager patch is getting bigger (it touches or adds 86 files to trunk) and the Plasma NM patch adds/changes other 28 files. Managing all those files outside svn makes me loose time, but since trunk is closed for new features I will have to wait until KDE SC 4.5.0 is released.

Of course I will have to change interface details window, it becomes too big when all information is displayed. Maybe I will add a new "Hardware details" tab and move some things there. When I have more time I am going to implement selecting which information to display too. The MM implementation is taking more time than I have thought because MM specification does some things differently from NM specification and I had to think about how to solve the problems that changes brought up.

14 comments:

scott said...

this is cool.

thanks for all your work on the network management widget.. when/where will this be landing? 4.5 or later?

Fri13 said...

Looks more and more needed program for KDE SC than what is now available.

I just have a question that is it possible to place MAC address under IP address? That makes it much easier for IT-support to work with multiple machines (classes etc) when they need to get IP/MAC together?

TGM said...

That is one huge plasmoid - will it fit on smaller screens?

Richard Hartmann said...

Why not use git? That way, you can commit locally.
If you simply prefer svn, I suggest you take a look at svk which allows you to commit locally, as well.

Richard Hartmann said...

TGM raises an interesting point. The devices most likely to need a UMTS/GSM info screen are laptops.

Maybe add a button that allows the user to display more/less info?

Anonymous said...

Sorry for being OT, but ever since I switched to KDE4, I was looking for something to replace Kima. Can you please tell me how you got your CPU freq and temperature to display like that (left to the graphs in the panel)? Thanks

Lamarque said...

@scott, it is too late for KDE SC 4.5.x, this work will only be available in 4.6.0. There is still a lot of things to implement and test.

@Fri13, I plan to implement selecting which information to display like knm (monolithic version) does for tooltips. Besides selecting which information to display knm also lets choose the order they will appear too, that would fullfill your request.

@TGM, I do not know, the information details window is about 900x600 pixels, so it would cover almost all area of a low resolution display. I know that is problem to be solved, but since this code is going to be available only for 4.6.0 there is more than six months to fix that.

@Richard Hartmann, plasma nm uses svn, so I think I cannot use git here and I think using a hub between svn and git would only complicate things. One thing that takes me time is preparing the patch to send to reviewboard and I do not think git would help me with that either. Reviewboard is very pick about the patch format. A patch created using 'diff -Nru' is not accepted because reviewboard requires the correct svn revision number of each file being patched, so I have to create the patch using 'svn diff'. The strange thing is that 'svn diff' also does not use the correct revision number, it uses the same number for all files, so I created a script to retrieve the correct revision number and edit the patch so that I could send it to reviewboard.

About the info, I have a solution to select which info to display. The solid MM patch is big and complex in some parts, it must be finished before anything else or I risk not finishing it at all. I have implemented only half of the MM specification so far, specifically the half that matters for GSM Internet connection. The other half, CDMA, Location (modems with GPS like Sony MD400), Contacts, SMS, Hso, and Ussd does not work with my modem so I cannot test it anyway, I am going to implement them but I cannot test them.

@Annonymous, that is a superkaramba theme I created. I also missed kima and ksysguard applet, so I created four superkaramba themes (python based) to replace them, one for CPU clock and CPU and HD temperatures, one for CPU load, one for Memory usage and other for Network, which is the most complex of all four because it uses more python code to dectect the default route and is the only one that has a context menu. Unfortunately several things are hardcoded there (number of CPUs for instance) but they work for me. Superkaramba is very limited in some things (there is no layout to arrange widgets so you must place widgets using pixels, there is only one context menu, the theme window is always square or it would not fit the panel, etc) so it is difficult to improve Superkaramba themes. I wanted to create something quickly, Superkaramba works for that.

The Network theme is in kde-look, I can upload the others if you want them.

Fri13 said...

Cool, that is even better idea to have possibility to choose what info will be shown!

Eike Hein said...

> Managing all those files outside svn makes me loose time, but since trunk is closed for new features I will have to wait until KDE SC 4.5.0 is released.

Actually, trunk will open for 4.6 development when 4.5 reaches the RC stage, as trunk will then be branched to branches/KDE/4.5 for the final stretch of 4.5 development.

Anonymous said...

You should really try it git-svn.

Especially the possibility to create local branches -- and merge without problems -- is a complete win.

There is also a script somewhere that creates diff that work for reviewboard, though I have lost it. Guess some of the people on #plasma might now it.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Good work but please try to move as much information as possible out into a separate screen/dialog. All that most basic users will really care about is if they are connected or not and what strength the signal is. Everything else is really just for the tech folks.
Thanks

Kevin Kofler said...

I think you should try to get this stuff into 4.5, (feature and string) freezes be darned, distros will end up backporting it anyway!

Richard Hartmann said...

Kevin: You never did any l10n work, did you?

It's a rhetoric question, cause if you had, you would not disregard string freeze as easily.

Lamarque said...

@Sho, good to know that.

@Mat69, maybe will try git-svn but I have too many things go to during the next two months and if I commit the patches to trunk by the end of the month that would solve one my problems.

@Anonymous, I already said I am going to do that.

@Kevin Kofler, it is not only the string freeze that prevents me to commit the patches. The Plasma NM maintainer wanted to let my patches enter KDE SC 4.5.0 but I told him not do that because there are still a lot of things to implement and test. I also care for the work translation team do, I did translation before and have friends doing translation too.