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Monday, October 4, 2010

Solid Sprint: On the way home

After an explendid time in Madrid I am on my way home to Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and from here to Divinópolis (by car), where I live in. I left Madrid about twelve hours ago and I am waiting in São Paulo for my flight to Belo Horizonte (9:10 UTC right now), which will leave São Paulo in two and a half hours, so I have plenty of time to blog a little. I do not need to say that I am very tired now, specially after sleeping only three hours between Saturday and Sunday and after a long flight to São Paulo.

I really like Madrid and the guys from Ufocoders, thanks for hosting Solid Sprint. Metalworks did a leap in Solid for the next KDE SC version, 4.6 is gonna have a lot of nice features, at least from Solid point of view :-) From my part I have finished the Mobile Connection Wizard (MCW) to configure 3G connections using the two major technologies (GSM and CDMA). Unfortunately I do not have a CDMA device and the state where I live in, Minas Gerais, which is as large as France, does not have any CDMA deployment :-/ so it is impossible for me to test it. Even the CDMA part of the ModemManager backend is untested for the same reason, so if someone from US, India, China, or even other states in Brazil, where CDMA is more common wanted to do me a favour and test connecting using Plasma NM would be great. I am going to commit MCW when I get home, there is still some final polishing to do.

The other task I self-assigned to me is fixing a bug in Plasma NM that makes kded4 to crash when NetworkManager restarts. After some talk to Kevin and Will Stephenson I managed to reproduce the bug in my notebook and started debugging. What I have found so far is that two activatables are left when NM stops, which I think should not happen, all of them should be removed in that case. Since I was very tired yesterday night (before my flight to Brazil), I postponed this task until I get some rest.

So that is it for now and the commits are coming this week :-)

Update (16:25 UTC): finally I got to my friend's apartament in Belo Horizonte, I am going to Divinópolis tomorrow, now I need some sleep.

2 comments:

Shantanu said...

I've been a fan of the great modem support in NM since a long time, and I use it for CDMA and GSM, both. How may I help to test?

Lamarque said...

Just go into the interface details tab in Plasma NM and take a screenshot. The information I need to check out are the operator's name, signal quality and access thechnology (it should show something like Cdma/EvDO here).

The signal quality is the most problematic one because some modems, like mine Sony MD300, only supports signal quality when in Edge. My MD300 always reports 0% if it is in UMTS or HSDPA mode. The modem has a AT command to reports the number of bars, ModemManager does not have a API to access such information though.

After I commit the MCW you will just to configure a connection using and see if everything is fine, preferably comparing your old configuration file with the one gererated by MCW. But for now the screenshot or just a copy those three lines (operator, signal quality, access technology) and your Cdma modem vendor and model. Thanks for helping me.