[Sugar-devel] Modern Linux trends (was: Re: [PATCH] use ConsoleKit instead of HAL for)

[C. Scott Ananian]

Replying to quoted text is hard from my phone; bear with me.

On Monday, April 26, 2010, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 06:54:13PM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>
> and NM supports a number of static data files for configuration if that's what you want yo do.
>
> What I want to be able to do is exactly the same I can do using nm-applet.
> As for the static config files, I considered that in the past, but failed because I couldn't find any documentation locally (and didn't have internet access because that was exactly what I was trying to set up on the only laptop I had with me). Even now I find the documentation [1] to be rather lacking. I'm referred to the settings specification [2] for finding out what settings I need to supply; the specification lists 139 keys in 15 settings. It would take me hours to figure out how to connect to a bog-standard WPA2 access point this way.
> You seem to have experience using these files: would they work the same way using system connections with nm-applet would do? I.e. can I still change location and have NetworkManager connect automatically to available networks? Will Sugar still be able to show all available networks and let me pick them?
>

yes.  The best documentation is to connect to the network you like in
gnome's nm applet and save it as a system connection.  The resulting
XML file in nm's connection dir will show you what settings you need.

I also recommend d-feet for interactively querying NM for connection
properties and settings.

> so far I'm getting quite frustrated every time I try, wasting countless hours trying to accomplishing something that would have taken me mere minutes before. A normal user would be totally out of luck.

Maybe NetworkManager us the wrong tool for the job, then.  Are you
trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver?

> FWIW, I'm even planning to enhance Sugar [3] so I can run nm-applet, just to be able to _configure_ NetworkManager.

It sounds like you really want to run NM's connection editor, which is
a seperate application.  Nm-applet itself is trivial to clone, and
afaik sugar already did a good job of that.  The smarts are all
elsewhere, either in the headless NM daemon or in the connection
editor.
  --Scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )