NetworkManager

[Michael Terry]

So...  I was looking into allowing some sort of network connectivity
when in oem-config mode or ubiquity-only mode (as part of the oem-config
improvements spec).  This is notably useful if we start allowing
pre-downloads of updates, as discussed at UDS.  Here's my report:

Ideal solution: embeddable NetworkManager widget.  I believe this is
available in some fashion for KDE (plasma-widget-network-manager).  But
the GNOME version of NetworkManager assumes it's a panel applet (i.e.
there's no separation into a widget library and then also an applet --
it just ships a binary applet).  A possible solution here is to talk to
upstream to work to split the package into library and applet...  But
that might not be Karmic time-frame.

Other solutions:
 * embeddable notification area (that would just contain the
NetworkManager applet).  Nope.  There don't seem to be many GTK
system-tray implementations, and the GNOME one is tied to the panel
(bonobo and the whole bit).

 * embeddable panel.  Guh.  The panel was not designed to be embedded.

 * actually run a gnome-panel at the bottom of the screen as part of
ubiquity-dm.  This would probably be slow and consume a lot of real
estate just for one icon.  It would, however, look like the GDM screen
in Karmic, which has a panel too.  That would be nice and consistent...

 * write our own frontend to NetworkManager via dbus.  *Way* too much
re-implementation of the wheel in terms of dialogs and the UI.

What was the intended user experience for this anyway?  A little icon at
the upper right of Ubiquity that acted like the NetworkManager applet?
(i.e. left clicks would show a menu of access points and all that)

So as of right now, I don't have an avenue to work towards, except
trying to get network-manager-gnome to be a library.  But even then, I'd
like to know what we want to do with the UI to know what our
requirements would be for the fictional API.

-- 
mterry • Canonical
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