Lamarque's blog

Plasma NM 0.8.99 (AKA 0.9.0_rc4)

2012-01-21T23:46:00.000-02:00

It has been almost two months since the last release so I think it is time to release Plasma NM 0.8.99 (AKA 0.9.0_rc4). By the way this is my 100th post in my blog :-)

MD5Sum: 0b432b74b3b0a8fc16d553d4cfc0076c
SHA1Sum: 18d625a25b90f9591a5cfdabcf77269eb3ba33e0

Changelog:

291786: Do not use null pointer when updating WirelessInterfaceItem.
291798: Show APN string for the APN seleted by the user in Mobile Connection Wizard.
291122: Hide non-Internet APNs in Mobile Connection Wizard.
. Fix security type identification for wifi shared connections.
290715: fix certificate and key filenames with non-ASCII characters.
290684: fix crash when restarting NetworkManager.
. Small translation string changes.
. Add some checks to prevent crashes.
. Do not crash if no security type has been detected.
289856: Small increase in the height of connection items.
. Fix password flags handling.
289812: support WPA ad-hoc wifi connections. Also allows to create WPA shared wifi connections.
289072: Ask for secrets only once per connection attempt.
. Fix some spelling errors and add some more messages in main CMakeLists.txt.
. Abort cmake if no suitable NetworkManager headers are found.
288831: Fix WPA2 configuration dialog.
. Remove some unneeded files and code.
287794: Change mobile broadband (wwan) checkbox into a tristate checkbox.
285637: Change networkmanagement_configshell to inform errors through dialogs instead of console messages. That is important to make bluetooth tethering errors visible when using Bluedevil to launch networkmanagement_configshell.
. Try not to crash if NM does not respond to the AddConnection call.
287757: Fix crash when no NetworkManager backend is found.
268021: Disable connected notification by default since VPN connections can now use system tray icon to indicate connection's activation state.
287002: Caches deviceUni and activatableType in RemoteActivatable class to prevent dbus calls from freezing the desktop.

The following languages have more than 80% of strings translated:

ar ca ca@valencia cs da de el es et hr hu it km lt nb nds nl pa pl pt pt_BR ro ru sv uk zh_TW

Work and spare time shortage

2012-01-20T22:31:00.000-02:00

In the last weeks I have had too little time to blog or to do other things. As you already know my job at basysKom is very related to Plasma Active. Version 2 was released last month and we are working to implement new features and improve the current ones for version 3. Several task proposals are circulating in Plasma Active mailling list. In fact there are more things to do than developers to implement them, so if you are a developer and wish to implement your tablet app using Plasma Active API or improve something in Plasma Active pick your task.

In the Plasma NM front I have been fixing some few bugs, applying some patches that came to me (keep sending them, they are very important :-)) and changing Plasma NM to use asynchronous DBus API as much as possible. This last change is to prevent Plasma NM from causing freezes in plasma desktop, which is related to bug #287002. It is half implemented and I do not know when it is going to be ready. Anyway, it is an extense and invasive change, then it is not going to nm09 branch, only to master.

As you already noticed the usability changes are stalled. I really need help to keep improving Plasma NM. If you have interest in improving Plasma contact me and I will help with the first steps.

More changes in Plasma NM GUI

2012-01-03T01:15:00.001-02:00

The changes made the new implementation looks a little more like the old one :-)

Changed disconnect icon to user-offline.png;
Re-add the interface list, now it is hidden by default and can be toggled by the new "Show Interfaces..." button;
The interface list is always shown when clicking on an activated connection. If the connection list was hidden before clicking then it will be hidden after clicking on the "back" button in interface details window;
Add a disconnect button in interface details window. The current disconnect button is small, someone can wrongly tap on the connection item instead of the disconnect button, which will trigger the interface details window. With a disconnect button in interface details window the user can still disconnect instead of trying to tap the disconnect button again. The button is hidden when the connection is not activated;
Improvements in the filtering algorithm in connection list;
Show number of suppressed networks in the m_showMoreItem.

The result is below (use this link if you do not see the video):

And yes, I have noticed the graphical artifacts, the misaligned traffic plotter, the plasmoid's popup always closing when clicking on the "Hide Interfaces" button (it does not happen with 3D effects disabled, do not ask me why) and the not smoth plasmoid resizing. Except for the misaligned traffic plotter I do not think I can fix the other problems.

Wireless sharing with Plasma NM 0.9 (part 3)

2011-12-30T20:19:00.002-02:00

Last Christmas I received my usual presents: bugs to solve :-/ Bug #289812 drew my attention because it looks like NetworkManager supports WPA shared connections after all. I do not know since when but that does not matter :-)

This week I pushed some changes to make Plasma NM create WPA shared connections. The changes went to both master and nm09 branches. The instructions to create the connection are the same as I described in my last post about shared connections, just change the security type in the "Wireless Security" tab:

Now the tests. Well, my two notebooks can communicate with each other when both use Gentoo Linux. When my old notebook uses Windows XP it detects the network, tries to connect but the connection times out. The Symbian S60v5 in my cellphone also does almost the same: detects the ad-hoc network, tries to connect, shows an error message about missing feature (although it does not specify which feature) and gives up faster than Windows XP.

Although my notebooks talk to each other I am not sure if the communication is really encrypted. I guess I will have to find another computer to run a wifi sniffer to check it out :-)

New Plasma NM interface

2011-12-30T19:19:00.001-02:00

Those who use Plasma NM's master branch have already noticed that I started to push the usability changes. For now the changes are very similar to the ones I announced in my first post about usability changes:

And the screencast:

There are still more changes to come, for example: 1. Increase the height of each item in the network list (maybe two lines per item) to make it easier to tap on touchscreen devices; 2. Add a new item called "Connect to another network" to create new networks instead of using the control module; 3. Move the "<hidden network>" item to "Connect to another network"; 4. Find a new place for the "Enable Networking" checkbox, maybe move it to the control module since it is rarelly used; 5. Find a way to correctly align the elements in the GUI, QML looks much easier in this regard :-/

I saved all the comments I have received about Plasma NM GUI. I just do not have enough time to evaluate all of them, so be patient.

Update 01/01/2012: I had forgotten about a use of the interface list that is important. When you have more than one instance of the same interface (or device) it is difficult to distinguish each connection is associated to each interface. I tried to add a "Show Interfaces" button to toggle the old interface list:

As you can see it is not ready yet and of course if you clock on the "Hide Interfaces" it will look again like the first screenshot in this post. The plasmoid's height is bigger now because of the interface details tab, which is hidden, but takes up the space anyway. I will have to change the implementation to prevent the plasmoid from growing like that.

I also changed the disconnect button to "call-stop" icon, which still does not look that great but I did it for a reason: to make disconnecting easier. The old icon was small and if you do not click exactly on the icon it will show the interface details tab instead of disconnecting. I needed a bigger icon and that one was the best I could find. Actually, Plasma NM really needs new icons everywhere, there are icons that do not fit well, some are just ugly and some are not in standard KDE location. That is one of my long list of things to fix in Plasma NM :-/

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T15:40:00.000-02:00

In the last weeks I have been working more in Plasma Active (PA) than Plasma NM for obvious reasons. This week I have fixed several bugs assigned to PA, some of them still needs more developement, but still it has been a productive week.

In Plasma NM front things are slow, which can be seen as a good thing if you take into account the number of reported bugs is very low these weeks. Or I am doing a good job at fixing bugs or everybody is dropping Plasma NM, I hope it is the former :-) I have fixed most the of Krazy2 issues, the remaining ones are not solvable and I have not figure how to make Krazy2 ignores them. The issues are in the .kcfg files, which are XML files. The .kcfg files used by Plasma NM include some attributes for dbus configuration that trigger Krazy2 errors. I cannot remove the attributes, so I cannot fix those issues. I have tried extending the .kcfg specification using the tags but it did not work.

Next week everybody in basysKom is going to be on vacation (me too), so I will try to make some work on Plasma NM.

Today is Christmas evening, so merry Christmas everyone.

New job

2011-12-11T20:09:00.001-02:00

Since last November 14 I am working for basysKom. At last a job to work with KDE :-)

I am working in the Contour project, which is part of Plasma Active. One of the things I am working on is a replacement for the shutdown dialog used in KDE. The intention is make it more suitable for touchscreen devices, like the ones that Plasma Active is target to. The current result is this:

Ok, I admit we need to improve this. Well, the fact it has only three big buttons is intentional, the less buttons the less problems to use and big buttons are easier to press. The implementation is in branch ksmserver/qml-shutdowndlg of git://anongit.kde.org/kde-workspace and it is made partially in C++ and partially in QML. This mini-project is being a good way to learn QML, maybe in the (not near) future I can use what I have learnt in Plasma NM.

To implement that simpler dialog I did not have many problems. On the other hand the replacement for the current dialog has been giving me some headaches to implement all its look-and-feel, specially the button's context menu. It's not that difficult to implement static context menu in QML, but adding items dynamically is more difficult. Another problem in the current implemenation is the lack of tab order and some other keyboard for features, such as default widget when pressing the ENTER key and label's accelerators. I have not found how to do use those features in QML, maybe because QML is target to thouchscreen and not keyboard use.

This weekend I have finished to implement all features except the keybord features:

oxygen

And it works with other Plasma themes:

Air

Androbit

Elegance

And here the button's context menus (notice the small triangle on the buttons):

If you want to try it you can do it in KDE SC 4.7 too. You need to compile plasmacomponents from kde-runtime master first:

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-runtime
mkdir kde-runtime/build
cd kde-runtime/build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=..
cd plasma/declarativeimports
make && make install

Then you need to compile the branch mentioned earlier:

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-workspace
cd kde-workspace
git checkout ksmserver/qml-shutdowndlg
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
cd ksmserver
make && make install

Update 12/Dec/2012: some people asked how the dialog looks like with compositing disabled. Here it is:

New names for libmm-qt and libnm-qt

2011-12-07T23:35:00.001-02:00

I am in the process of moving the Qt bindings for ModemManager and NetworkManager to freedesktop.org. The next step for that is moving them to kdereview, which I asked to do last week.

The kdereview aim is allow other KDE developers to review the source code and suggest changes. One of the changes suggested is to use more descriptive names, so libmm-qt is now called QtModemManager and libnm-qt is now called QtNetworkManager. I chose those names because they follow Qt's library name convention. I have just commited the changes to QtModemManager, QtNetworkManager and networkmanagement (only master branch) repositories.

If everything does well, the next step is move QtModemManager and QtNetworkManager to extragear and from there to freedesktop.org.

To enter extragear I had to fix Krazy2 issues in QtModemManager and QtNetworkManager first. I also tested networkmanagement repository and it has lots of issues to solve, so for the time being I am fixing those issues as well.

Plasma NM 0.8.98

2011-11-26T20:23:00.001-02:00

Plasma NM 0.8.98 (AKA 0.9.0_rc3) is now available.

MD5Sum: e730805567a771506cb18c0a825738ef
SHA1Sum: f46274c4cca722f37eef7418144c0c04bfe21e24

Changelog:

286855: Refuses to create VPNC connections without user or group info since vpnc-0.5.3 refuses to connect without them.
287531: Add some checks to prevent crash when PolicyKit denies connection editing.
287076: Report error message on VPN activation failure.
285637: Fix icons for bluetooth interface item and system tray (when the bluetooth interface is the default interface).
286424: Try to prevent gsm connection access technology change from freezing plasma-desktop for a few seconds.
285637: Fix creation of NAP/PAN bluetooth connections.
286856: Show user and group names in vpnc authentication dialog.
283204: Set Bluetooth DUN's passwords as AgentOwned by default.
286666: Do not reset username and password fields when changing Dynamic WEP's authentication method.
. Always asks secrets from user if NM requested new secrets.
286243: prevent crash when resuming from RAM.
283241: fix random crash.
. Add check for minimum openconnect version required (3.03).

The following languages have more than 80% of the strings translated:

ca cs da de el hr it lt nb nds nl pt pt_BR ro ru sv uk zh_CN zh_TW

NetworkManager: per device routing tables

2011-11-22T21:31:00.001-02:00

Today Alex Fiestas told me about one problem he has and that I had long ago.

Everybody uses Internet nowadays and probably most of you know what IP address, netmask, gateway address mean. For example, my notebook is using this configuration right now:

eth0

IP address: 192.168.1.10

Netmask: 255.255.255.0

Gateway: 192.168.1.1

wlan0

IP address: 192.168.1.12

Netmask: 255.255.255.0

Gateway: 192.168.1.1

Yes, two devices in the same local network, but that does not invalidate this post :-)

Although I have the same IP as gateway for my two devices the Linux kernel sees 192.168.1.1/eth0 and 192.168.1.1/wlan0, not 192.168.1.1 alone. When there is only one active device there is no problem, but what happens if you have two, like my notebook?

Only one of those two IP address/device pairs is the default route, that is, the IP address/device pair the Linux resorts to when it cannot find the computer to connect to. Now enters NetworkManager. NetworkManager sorts devices by type when deciding which one to configure as default route. If I am not mistaken it sorts like this: wired, wifi, mobile broadband.

Now the problem:

Suppose you are connected using wlan0 only, with Kmail, Kopete, Konversation, etc up and running. Then you decide to plug the ethernet cable (eth0) and keep wlan0 also active. NetworkManager will switch the default route from wlan0 to eth0. Now what happens with the connections Kmail, Kopete, Konversation opened when eth0 was the default route? Well, if you do not have a proper routing table configuration they will stop working because the Linux kernel, by default, does not expect receiving IP packets from the old gateway's IP address/device pair anymore, only from the new gateway's IP address/device pair.

When the connections time out (in a couple of minutes or so) the Linux kernel will close them, but not before you get annoyed by seeing your connections closing in front you even though you have two, not only one, active connections.

Long ago I created a script similar to this one to solve this problem for me. I have even forgotten that I had this configuration in my notebook. If you have this same problem just do:

Code

$ wget http://kde-mg.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/per_device_routing_tables.txt
$ sudo chown root:root per_device_routing_tables.txt
$ sudo chmod 700 per_device_routing_tables.txt
$ sudo mv per_device_routing_tables.txt \
  /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/per_device_routing_tables.sh

Add one line per device to file /etc/iproute2/rt_tables like this:

File /etc/iproute2/rt_tables

100     eth0
101     wlan0

The first column contains the table's id, they just need to be different from each other. The second column contains the table's name. The script above assumes the table's name is equal to the device's interface name.

Finally, restart all your connections. When when NM switches the default route all existing connections will keep working.

What the script does is create one routing table for each device (one for eth0 and one for wlan0 in the example above). There is one default route in each routing table and the global default route (the one NM changes) still exists. Even when the global default route is changed the per device default routes continue intact and let the existing connections to reach the Internet using the correct IP address/device pair.

Enjoy :-)

Installing libnm-qt in a different prefix

2011-11-20T16:44:00.001-02:00

Some people have some problems installing libmm-qt and libnm-qt in a different prefix than /usr. Today I have finished to implement pkgconfig support and now you can install libmm-qt and libnm-qt in a different prefix:

. PREFIX="/opt"
. export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig:$PREFIX/lib32/pkgconfig:$PREFIX/lib64/pkgconfig"

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/libmm-qt
. mkdir libmm-qt_build
. cd libmm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$PREFIX ../libmm-qt
. make && make install

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/libnm-qt
. mkdir libnm-qt_build
. cd ../libnm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$PREFIX ../libnm-qt
. make && make install

Compiling master branch is still the same:

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/networkmanagement
. mkdir networkmanagement_build
. cd networkmanagement_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../networkmanagement
. make && make install

Bluetooth tethering video

2011-11-08T01:52:00.000-02:00

There is some time I wanted to create this video explaining how to create bluetooth connections in Plasma NM using Bluedevil-1.2. Here it is:

Bluetooth tethering is not exactly new feature in Plasma NM, it was added almost seven months ago, yet some people still have difficult adding connections.

Unfortunately for devices that use NAP, like iPhone, there is a bug in Bluedevil that prevents Bluedevil from dectecting the NAP service from the phone. For now you can use networkmanagement_configshell to create a NAP-type bluetooth connections. Bluedeveil-1.2 works for DUN-type connections, like it is shown in the video.

Help KDE e.V. secure funding for a sprint with just a few clicks

2011-11-06T13:13:00.001-02:00

Some weeks ago Lydia blogged about a German bank giving away 1000 euros for each 1000 associations who can get the most votes. Well, until eight days ago we were at postion 320, now we are at 1155, as you can see:

If the poll finished today we would be out :-( The poll finishes tomorrow, so we need the votes now. Please, read Lydia's post about how to vote and help KDE e.V., it is just a few clicks.

Just the poll page is in German, but the poll is not limited to German citizens. Anyone can vote three times using your e-mail.

I would like to thank who have voted in the last days. Unfortunately we still need more votes since the poll finishes tomorrow. In the last 24h we have lost several positions, we need to keep the pace we were before to reach our goal.

Plasma NM 0.8.95

2011-11-04T00:52:00.000-02:00

Plasma NM 0.8.95 (AKA 0.9.0_rc2) is now available.

MD5Sum: 14f4051446a33be9bd46b34763acd760
SHA1Sum: 43df2e26acb1b96f3b5e394568a25d04036a085b

Changelog:

284743: fix crash after installing updates with apper.
284717: fix crash when browsing bluetooth device.
283017: fix crash after bluetooth teathering failure.

. use network.svgz as default icon path for svg icons again. Svg icons are themed, so we need to keep this filename. We will the new network2.svgz for mobile icons until the changes in network2.svgz are integrated into network.svgz.

285069: add tooltip explaining how to use wifi security's alternate subject matches in Plasma NM's wifi edit dialog.
285255: fix crash after resume from suspend.
285406: enable VPN Interface item in activating and activated connection states.

The following languages have more than 80% of the strings translated:

ca cs da de hr lt nb nds nl pt pt_BR sv uk zh_TW

PS: for the braves that use Plasma NM master branch there is a fix for a crash in bluetooth tethering support in libnm-qt. The bug does not affect nm09 branch since it does not use libnm-qt.

New home for libnm-qt

2011-10-27T20:31:00.000-02:00

Today I have finished to move libnm-qt and libmm-qt to http://projects.kde.org. To compile them do (in this order):

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/libmm-qt
. mkdir libmm-qt_build
. cd libmm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../libmm-qt
. make && make install

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/libnm-qt
. mkdir libnm-qt_build
. cd ../libnm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../libnm-qt
. make && make install

Compiling master branch is still the same:

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/networkmanagement
. mkdir networkmanagement_build
. cd networkmanagement_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../networkmanagement
. make && make install

I must say this new Plasma NM + libnm-qt is working quite good, no big problems in the last days. I will start to port the usability changes to master branch early next month, for now there are other things that require my attention.

Plasma NM: libnm-qt working

2011-10-24T03:54:00.001-02:00

I thought it would take me more time to make Plasma NM work with libnm-qt :-) I have just commited the last bugs fixes for the bugs I have found so far and Plasma NM/libnm-qt works. There are no visual changes, so there is no point in showing a screenshot :-P

Updating my post about the work to port Plasma NM to NM-0.9 we have:

Create the new Solid's NM-0.9 backend outside kde-workspace repository so that we could change it freely without KDE's freature freeze/ABI restrictions. (DONE)
Make it compile against NM-0.8.999. (DONE)
Remove #ifdef COMPILE_MODEM_MANAGER_SUPPORT and #ifdef NM_0_8 from the source code. (DONE)
Make everything compile/work when the old NM-0.7 backend from KDE SC 4.{6,7} is installed. (DONE)
Create code to import existing NM-0.8 connections to NM-0.9. (DONE)
Make it really work with NM0-0.9.0. (DONE)
First Plasma NM release. (DONE)
Convert code to use libnm-qt instead of Solid::Control::*Nm09. (DONE)
Finish to implement libnm-qt and libmm-qt. (DONE)
Apply usability changes. (IN PROGRESS)
Implement the new interface types: LTE, Wimax and OlpcMesh. (IN PROGRESS)
Fix "paper cuts" bugs (IN PROGRESS)
Improve VPN support. (TO BE DONE)
Improve support for Pppoe (DONE), Cdma and IPv6. (TO BE DONE)
Improve notifications support. Hmm after some thoughts and testing I honestly do not know how to improve it. (TO BE DONE)
Implement automatic proxy re-configuration. I think this should be done in NM itself to make it work with system connections and with non-KDE programs, such as Firefox, Chromium, Opera, etc. (UPSTREAM)
Implement option to run scripts before and after connection's (de)activation like in WICD. I think this should be done in NM itself so that it works with system connection. (UPSTREAM)

Libnm-qt works very well in my notebook, it can be considered stable now. I may release Plasma NM 0.9.0 final (no libnm-qt) probably next week if no other important bug appears. Talking about bugs, yesterday I fixed the last crash bug assigned to Plasma NM in bugs.kde.org. Now we only have one major bug (related to importing old settings from Plasma NM for NM-0.8), several normal bugs and wishes.

None of the remaining 27 bugs are related to crashes and they are mostly wishes, so please, distributions, use Plasma NM 0.8.95 instead of shipping outdated Plasma NM versions full of bugs that were fixed months ago. I also need more people testing the three releases I already made. Of course 0.8.95 is the most important one, so report bugs in 0.8.95 so that I can release a really rock solid Plasma NM 0.9.0.

Plasma NM: master branch

2011-10-23T03:14:00.002-02:00

I have just converted master branch to contain the Plasma NM code for NM-0.9 ported to libnm-qt and libmm-qt. The branch compiles but I have not tested it yet, I will do it tomorrow (it's very late at night here in Brasil).

Anybody willing to help to stabilize this version do the following:

1. Compile libmm-qt and libnm-qt in this order (libmm-qt is a dependency of libnm-qt). Update 27/10/2011: read new instructions:

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/clones/kde-workspace/iliakats/libnm-qt.git
. mkdir libnm-qt/{libnm-qt_build,libmm-qt_build}
. cd libnm-qt/libmm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../libmm-qt
. make && make install

. cd ../libnm-qt_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../libnm-qt
. make && make install

2. Compile Plasma NM's master branch:

. git clone git://anongit.kde.org/networkmanagement
. mkdir networkmanagement_build
. cd networkmanagement_build
. cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../networkmanagement
. make && make install

Have fun... or not :-)

Plasma NM 0.8.90

2011-10-22T20:24:00.000-02:00

New version after the first release:

Plasma NM 0.8.90

MD5Sum: 25cfce5072bf0658a2b33b76d2df80b5
SHA1Sum: 9336049eb00f5e4fe7434e710eeb0bdfc22e0984

No usability changes yet. Here is the changelog:

. fix crash in the plasmoid if kded4 crashes or restarts.
. prevent crash when stopping NetworkManager.
. fix updating the last used timestamp.
283776: Make Network Manager show signal strength in system tray also for mobile broadband connections.

. make changing connection item's font on activation state change work again.
283663: fix status tray strength indicator does not update when network manager extender is opened.
283647: use QIntValidator instead of inputmask to make the pin dialog prettier.
283720: fix GSM signal strengh position in connection list and add tooltip for it.
283583: make OpenConnect VPN plugin optional.
. fix some translatable messages.

The following languages have more than 80% of the strings translated:

ast bs ca ca@valencia cs da de el en_GB es et fr hr hu it km ko lt nb nds nl pa pl pt pt_BR ro ru sl sv tr uk zh_TW

Plasma NM: what is going on (libnm-qt and libmm-qt)

2011-10-22T16:25:00.001-02:00

As I wrote during the last Solid Sprint we are working to bring libnm-qt and libmm-qt to Plasma NM. Libnm-qt is a Qt-only wrapper around NetworkManager's API and DBus interface. Libmm-qt is the same for ModemManager's DBus interface. Both libraries were created by Will Stephenson for NetworkManager 0.8 and ModemManager 0.4. Ilia Kats ported libnm-qt to NetworkManager 0.9 API during the Sprint. Thanks to both for working on that.

This week I have started to port Plasma NM to libnm-qt, I had to do some changes in libnm-qt and libmm-qt to allow Plasma NM to compile against it, nothing that special. There is still a long road to go, according to cmake I can compile about 31% of Plasma NM's +57K lines source code, not counting the auto-generated .cpp and .h, nor the .xml files used to generate them. Some parts of Plasma NM are going to be refactored since libnm-qt implements them itself. Fortunately, that also means Plasma NM's source code is going to shrink a bit.

libnm-qt is basically the Solid's NM backend (networkmanagement/solidcontrolfuture/solid/networkmanager-0.9) refactored to work as a public library instead of a private backend of networkmanagement/solidcontrolfuture/libs/solid/control/network*. The same is true for libmm-qt, kde-workspace/solid/modemmanager-0.4 and kde-workspace/libs/solid/control/modem*. All this means we are finally getting rid of Solid::Control classes (a goal from last year's Solid Sprint). KDE SC 4.8.0 is not going to use Solid::Control anymore, but libnm-qt and libmm-qt are going to be dependencies for any KDE program that needs to list network interfaces (kinfocenter for example). Update 23/10: removing Solid::Control::Network* now would also remove part of Wicd's support, so for now I will not remove Solid::Control until we figure out a way to support NetworkManager, Wicd and possibly Connman.

The final goal with libnm-qt and libmm-qt is to move than to NetworkManager's repository so that NM guys can help to maintain them. That is for next year, probably. We still need to get the libraries ready before that happens.

Now applications can retrieve network status (online, offline) using either kded's networkstatus module, which does not depend on libnm-qt and works for NetworkManager and Wicd, or libnm-qt.

You can find both libnm-qt and libmm-qt in git://anongit.kde.org. Be warned that sometimes I do break their ABI.

I am also going to release Plasma NM 0.8.90 (0.9.0_rc1) today. I am just waiting for the tar bal to reach ftp://download.kde.org. Stay tuned for the announcement.

So that is what is happening in KDE's Network Management front :-)

Plasma NM: bugs closed after 4.7.1

2011-10-13T14:24:00.000-03:00

I almost forgot to post the bugs fixed since my last post. This list covers bugs closed after 4.7.1 until the release of 0.8.80 (AKA 0.9.0_beta1):

283204: set default GSM's "password" flag to AgentOwned to prevent the password from not being saved at all and, consequently, the secrets dialog appearing at each connection attempt.
. enable autoconnect by default for WiFi connections.
. make defaultroute overlay icon really appear over the network icon in the network list.
. improve connection sorting performance.
272181: prevents wifi security icon misplacement.
. hide wifi shared connections and item if wireless is disabled.
282584: limit connection's name to 20 characters when exibiting them in connection list.

. momentously change system tray network interface to the activating interface. Turn back to the default route interface after the activating interface stops changing state. Eventually the new default route interface will be the activating interface, but if the activating fails it will likely not.
. several performance improvements in plasmoid's startup.
. use the interface with default route to update system tray's icon.
271766: fix overlay not shown when adding plasmoid.
254070: prevent two crashes due to dangling pointers when NM stops.
. fix crash in OpenConnect when trying to connect to an empty/unset host.
. rework VPN status overlay icon.
. reimplement hover events in vpnInterfaceItem to get proper highlighting of VPN connections in the UI.
249319: fix networkmanager plasmoid icons too small when in panel.
. fix resize/paint problems when Plasma NM is used on desktops instead of panels.
282282: mark some OpenConnect secrets as NotSaved, since they are changing every session.
. save/restore "Show More" button state across reboots. Also change the default state to true (or checked), which is list all networks available.
268026: show interface details instead of deactivating the connection when clicking on an active connection.
190342: enable hover effects on system tray icon.
281962, 282085: improve error message for wrong NM version.
. add wifi's band and channel info to interface details.
. fix saving secrets for system connections (they were being marked as AgentOwned).
. detect adhoc mode when creating wifi connections with networkmanagemnet_configshell.
204170: make DSL connections (PPPOE) work. Still needs improvements.
. improve NM version dectection during compilation.
. fix crash when suspending with wifi enabled and afterwards resuming with wifi disabled.

Resuming there are 3 crash fixes, 11 bug fixes and 13 improvements. The, not yet released, 0.8.81 is going to include more small improvents and more complete translations, which are already available if you compile branch nm09 yourself.

As I stated before, master branch is going to hold the new Plasma NM development version and not the code for NM-0.8. Please update your build system to point to branch nm08 if you want to compile Plasma NM for NM-0.8. Plasma NM for NM 0.8.x is also deprecated and unmaintained, so please upgrade to NM-0.9 and Plasma NM 0.8.80 as soon as possible.

Plasma NM: first release

2011-10-07T19:28:00.000-03:00

Yes, that is right, we have the first release of Plasma NM and from now on there is going to be regular Plasma NM releases.

During Solid Sprint I accepted the job of being KDE's Network Management maintainer. I would like to thank Alex Fiestas and Will Stephenson (former maintainer) for trusting me for this job. One of the tasks of a maintainer is releasing software, so here it is:

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=unstable/networkmanagement/0.8.80/src/networkmanagement-0.8.80.tar.bz2

MD5Sum: 0ec58c1f119d0fe2be5045c6cc1dfe9c
SHA1Sum: 4c60e4cd30f69a2bc47091b7472040e0f69c4404

0.8.80 means 0.9.0_beta1 (first beta version of Plasma NM compatible with NetworkManager-0.9.x). There are translations for 49 languages in the tar ball, though they are not 100% complete yet:

ar ast bs ca ca@valencia cs da de el en_GB eo es et fi fr ga gl hr hu is it ja km ko lt lv mai ms nb nds nl nn pa pl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sl sq sv th tr ug uk wa zh_CN zh_TW

This release is basically what is in nm09 branch as of October 01 and does not contain the usability changes I have blogged about. I plan to release 0.9.0 final with most complete translations as possible. The usability changes will probably go to 0.9.1 along with libnm-qt port.

Solid Sprint: day 3

2011-10-06T00:51:00.000-03:00

Well, day 2 almost did not finish for some of us since Alex Fiestas, Ilia Kats and me stayed at the office and almost did not sleep.

After long ours of work we did a break by 3:00 am and Ilia Kats showed us his skills in biology. I have not mentioned it but Ilia is finishing his bachelor course in biology and started to use Linux just one year ago :-O He explained to us the research he is doing at university about protein degradation. The chat was very interesting and Alex Fiestas and me continued asking him about other curiosities we have heard about biology. In the end we had good lessons about how proteins work, how to activate and deactivate them, how they are degradated, how to measure how much time the degradation process lasts. All this to research how we get old. If Ilia succeeds maybe we will have a fountain of youth in the future :-D Ah, we also learned (in details) how our immune system works, how vaccines force our imute system to get stronger, how the HIV virus disables it, how DNA works, what happens with our chromosomes when we get older. Very interesting indeed.

Ok, turning back to the silicon beings. I almost finished to implemented the new main window. I hope you like it:

The "Enable Networking" check box and "Show More" button are now in the system tray's right click menu. "Show More" has also been renamed to "Show unsaved networks":

And now the new (unfinished) details window:

I am going to implement the new create connection's window in the next days. Since the usability changes are big I will add then slowly to keep the current code working without losing any functionality. The idea is to hide advanced features/configurations to let the most used ones visible and simpler to use by "Penny" :-)

Another big change in Plasma NM is the replacement of Solid's NM backend by libnm-qt. Libnm-qt does not bring any user visible change, but it is important for us developers. The replacement has been postponed several times and now that Ilia made it compile against our branch nm09 I think it is the time to really finish the job and incorporate it in the "official" Plasma NM. I want to move to libnm-qt before we continue with the usability changes to make my life easier. I am being selfish here for a reason: Ilia is going to start a new semester at university, which will make me almost alone to implement the most important changes in Plasma NM. I plan to finish the transition to libnm-qt next week, then I will apply the new main window changes.

VERY IMPORTANT: currently networkmanagement's master branch holds the Plasma NM version for NM-0.8. A new branch nm08 was created and it holds the Plasma NM for NM-0.8 from now on. The master branch is going to hold the new libnm-qt when I finish to port it to nm09 code. So distributions, pay attention to this change and update your package build system to point to the correct branch.

Update: my "employer", which does not use KDE and does no pay me to work on KDE, gave me a new task with a tight schedule. I will have to postpone everything related to KDE for at least 15 days. I also need to review all the feedback I have received about the usability changes. I am going to change some things to accommodate the new ideas, so probably there will be no new Plasma NM this month.

Solid Sprint: day 2

2011-10-03T12:17:00.000-03:00

Saturday started with us continuing the discussing about the usability changes in Plasma NM. Then we started coding :-) I worked on implementing the mock-ups and Ilia Kats worked on getting libnm-qt into shape to be committed to nm09. Since the usability and libnm-qt changes are extense I think it is best for us to finish one to concentrate on the other. Doing it in parallel would not work.

I also accepted the job of being the new Plasma NM (or Solid Network Manager) maintainer. I am even going to have a lamarque@kde.org e-mail :-D More on that in the next post.

Solid Sprint: day 1

2011-10-03T12:06:00.000-03:00

Well, I must say that I like that usability study we are doing. It has already given me good ideas on how to really improve Plasma NM GUI. I hope the users agree with the changes we are going to implement.

Today we have spent all day in the usability experiment, we already have some mock-ups (no spoil) :-) Dario and Alex have fixed a lots of bugs in the meantime. They even recorded a showcase to show you how to use one of the new Powerdevil features (more on that when they publish the video).

Tomorrow I think we are going to start coding the usability changes. Until now we have discussed the needs of our "personas" and how to fullfill them. Tomorrow we will start doing what we hackers really like: coding :-) Stay tunned.

Solid Sprint: day 0

2011-09-30T22:24:00.002-03:00

Like a good C/C++ programmer I start to count from zero :-) Just to finish day -1 (Sep 28): after a nap to get over the sleepy feeling I met Alex Fiestas, Alex's brother, Raphael (ereslibre), and a friend of theirs to have dinner. I must say I really like Spanish food. After the dinner I and Alex were going back to the hotel and Ilia Kats approached us in the subway wagon. I have been talking to Ilia for several months but that was the first time we met, it was a good surprise. Unfortunately for us the subway closed before we could switch to the final line, so we went to the hotel by taxi. End of day -1 :-)

Day 0: Since the usability master (Björn) would arrived only at afternoon, Ilia and I tried to fix this annoying bug in Plasma NM in the meantime. In the end we found that it is an upstream bug in Qt, Ilia managed to create a workaround to prevent it. It is not perfect but since Qt4 seems "frozen" we do not see much hope to have this bug fixed, so the workaround is going to stay until we move to Qt5.

Björn arrived at afternoon as expected, unfortunately some guys did not make it to the sprint, but that is ok. Dario almost lost the sprint, but he is here and as always killing bugs like Rambo kills his enemies :-) During the rest of the day (and almost all night) and started the usability study on Plasma NM. I will not spoil so you will have to wait to see the results when we start to commit the changes.

That is all for day 0 :-D

Solid Sprint: day -1

2011-09-28T08:47:00.002-03:00

Finally I got to the hotel room in Madrid, I think it is the same room I stayed last year by the view on the window. I took me 20 hours and 20 minutes of traveling to get here. My calculations was wrong by ~40 minutes (~3%). I need to improve this next time hehe. Now I need to rest (25 hours without sleeping + jet lag). Metal workers, see ya tomorrow, except for Rodrigo Belem (another Brazilian) and Ilia Kats, who must be arriving at any time here at the hotel.

Solid Sprint: day -2

2011-09-27T00:15:00.003-03:00

Ok, ok, the sprint has not started yet. I am still here at home packing my stuff, checking the last details for the trip and writing the post :-D. That will be long trip until Madrid. Just to get to the airport it will take me three hours and two buses, more ~10 hours flying to Lisbon, about one and a half hour more to reach Madrid and one more hour to get to the hotel in Madrid by underground/subway. If I add the time I am going to sit waiting for buses, flights and underground it will be almost 21 hours of traveling. Last year it took me more than that because I had to wait five hours in São Paulo's airport in Brasil before flying to Madrid, now I am going to wait two hours in Lisbon.

If you follow my commits you have noticed they have been more intense in the last week. I wanted to push some fixes now and concentrate on the usability changes during the sprint. Am I exaggerating? No, there are plenty of problems to solve and things to implement in Plasma NM and also in other parts of KDE's network management too, so there will still be much to do after the sprint. Network management is not easy to work on, when you try to fix something sometimes you find another bug in the way, you try to fix that one, and another one appears. That was what happened to me and why I did so many commits in the last week :-) There is still one fix left that I wanted to do before the trip but will have to wait until I come back from the sprint. Or maybe I can fix it during all those waiting hours until Madrid.

Today I have also fixed one problem in kded's networkstatus module: it does not work if you start a KDE session with NM stopped. It also stops working if you restarts NM because it did not watch for NM DBus service appearing and disappearing, now it does :-) It seems there is another problem in networkstatus module, more precisely in ntrack support. Since I have never used ntrack and, of course, do not have it installed, I could not test if my diagnostic is really correct.

Well, the week is still starting and serveral things have happened already. It looks like a great week ahead :-D

Plasma NM: usability changes

2011-09-17T21:29:00.004-03:00

Solid Sprint is going to start in less than two weeks in Madrid. This time one of the attendees (Björn Balazs) is an usability guy, so we are going to talk about usability problems in the software we maintain, in my case Plasma NM. Some days ago Björn asked about the points we (the other attendees) would like to discuss during the sprint. Well, I already sent my list, which is not that extense but is not short either:

In the last months I have received several complaints about Plasma NM user interface. I have also thought about what I could change and today I decided to implement some of my thoughts in my private Plasma NM repository. What you are going to see is not a mock up :-)

For those who do not believe that is not a mock up, here is the screencast:

Those changes are not final. I am going to discuss them with Björn Balazs and the other Solid guys before commiting anything. This is post is to present and ask comments about them. Do not expect any GUI changes in Plasma NM before the end of the sprint next month.

Update: answering some questions:

@damian, 1. the "Enable" checkboxes are there not only for users clicking on them but also for NetworkManager daemon to inform which features are enabled. NM can disable network, wireless and mobile brodband without user intervention, if I move the checkboxes to the interfaces tab then users will have to go to interfaces tab to see why there is no connection listed when wireless is disabled for instance. Also, mobile broadband is always disabed by default by NM daemon, so for mobile broadband connections checking the "Enable mobile broadband" checkbox is required. Well, actually if you click on the mobile broadband connection it will enable mobile broadband, so it is not required :-) But if the modem takes too much time to active itself the connection can times out and some modems, like my Sony MD300, can be activated only once by NM. After that I have to remove it from the USB port and plug it again to make another connection. In resume: keeping the checkboxes in the connection list tab saves one click in some situations. 2. I like the fact that I can access the details tab by clicking on one active connection, specially because now there is no visible way to associate one interface to one connection. Think about people who have more than one instance of the same interface type. I have a 3G modem and when I plug my cellphone I will have a second gsm interface. I can connect the same Gsm connection using either device. In this case it is usefull to get to the interface details by clicking on the connection instead of first figuring out which network interface is activated and then clicking on it. 3. I like the "Show More" button (now "Show all" checkbox) and it is going to stay there as long as I am working on Plasma NM :-P. The item is required because of the way NM work. I explain: after creating a hidden wifi connection it HAS to be activated so that NM uses wpa_supplicant's ap_scan=2 option to search for it. NM uses ap_scan=1 by default, do not ask me why, maybe to save power or to be faster, I do not know. When using ap_scan=1 wpa_supplicant does not search for hidden networks, with ap_scan=2 it does. So I need a way to ask the ssid and activate the hidden network after it has been created. It is not a normal connection because normal connections do have to be activated right after creating them. Maybe adding a new "Hidden" checkbox in wireless dialog is better, but since there are two bug entries about the complexity of creating connections I am not willing to add more widgets to connection dialogs.
@Anonymous, I will change Plasma NM to save the "Show More" state across restarts. Maybe I can add a option in "Manage Connections" -> Other to always show all connections. When it is activated I can hide the "Show More" button / "Show all" checkbox. "when the mouse cursor is floating over a interface of the list it should change the line of the video that says 'Connected to xxxxxxx' with 'Click to disable' if the interface is enabled & 'Click to enable' if the interface is disabled." It is good suggestion, I will see what I can do. Just keep in mind that wired ethernet cannot be enable/disabled in NM, only wireless and mobile broadband can. The "mini-icon" (disconnect button) on the interface item only appears if there is one activated connection using that interface. I do not see a need to change colors to indicate the connection state. Also, keep in mind that there are daltonian people (like me) out there who have difficulty to distinguish colors, specially in tiny buttons like that one. I prefer to show/hide the tiny button, it is more visible. OBS: although I am daltonian I can distinguish between red and green, there are several levels of daltonism, luckily for me mine is not that severe.
@Srk9, unfortunately NM's API does not provide means to change the default route from one network interface to another, so it is not possible for me to implement your suggestion.
@Anonymous, yes, there are some artifacts in Plasma NM GUI, but they are not as bad as in the youtube video, which was recorded at 15 frames per second by the way. I will use 30 fps the next time I do a screencast, I think youtube trancodes the video to 15 fps, right? Some of the "artifacts" in the video are actually Plasma effects, they look much better in real time :-). In fact, the only two artifacts that really happens in the video happen when changing the network interface used in interface details tab and when clicking on the "Show all" checkbox. The connection list is a Plasma::ScrollWidget class, which adds all items first before creating the vertical scrollbar and shrinking the visible part of the list. That is a bug (or whatever you want to call it) in Plasma::ScrollWidget triggered by the fact that all QGraphicsWidget (Plasma's widget base class) are shown by default, in contrast to the hidden default used in QWidget class used by most KDE's software.
@emilsedgh, allowing to select which interface details to show is already a pending implementation. You can enable notifications to show the connection state, just to go Manage Connections (or system settings -> Network Settings) -> Other -> Configure Notifications and enable "Establishing Network Connection" and "Network Connection Succeed". You can enable "Interface changed state" instead but it is more "verbose". The system tray icon also shows the connection state change, but I agree that it is really subtle.
@Anonymous, how is it more complicated? Main window is smaller and there are less widgets in it.
@Anthony Vital, thanks for the tip about Plasma::ScrollWidget, it works great. One less artifact in Plasma NM GUI :-)
@Anonymous, I kind of like the kickoff plasmoid.
@yoda, some people do not like the "Show More" button, they have difficulty to figure out what it really does :-/ So I am trying to keep it there without drawing to much attention. Plasma allows more entries in right click menu icon, I can add some more items there. I just do not know if I can add QAction's there like you suggested. Kmix is not a plasmoid so it is able to add QAction's at will, I just need to figure out if plasmoids can do the same. Update Sep 20: it can, just return the QAction list in contextualActions(). "how I'm supposed to see details of other interface?" For now it works like you described, you need to go back to the Interfaces tab and click on the second interface to see its details. I like the mockup you created, I will join the Details tab to the Interface tab like you suggested. Maybe not exactly like in the mockup but I will. I have just commited to branch nm09 the change to show interface details instead of deactivating the connection when clicking on an active connection. That already works in the youtube video and since it does not change the GUI I do not see why not commiting it now.
@Aaron J. Seigo, thanks, I am glad to know people like the changes :-) I plan to save the "Show all" checkox state between restarts. When ready I can change the "Show all" default to enabled and the connection list will be completely visible. Those, like me, who prefer "Show all" unchecked will need to change it only once. I think that is the best solution.
@BajK, I am taking the oportunity to talk in person to someone with skills in usability to assist me :-) Well, this commit partially fix your problem: the plasmoid will be shown poped up, but I do not know exactly why the background still keeps the icon's dimensions instead of the popup's dimensions. I will try to figure out why. Update Sep 20: problem fixed.

Common errors when migrating to or using NM-0.9

2011-09-07T22:32:00.000-03:00

I have seen people having problems to migrate from NetworkManager-0.8 to 0.9, here are some tips to solve those problems:

NM-0.9 requires wpa_supplicant-0.8. You need to add the entries CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE_DBUS=y, CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE_DBUS_NEW=y and CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE_DBUS_INTRO=y to wpa_supplicant's .config file before compiling it. Alternatively, you can patch wpa_supplicant-0.7.3 to make it support the new DBus API, which is what NM-0.9 really requires.
You cannot have more than one instance of wpa_supplicant running or NM's wifi support will be unstable or even not work. wicd, ifplugd, net_applet are some programs that also start wpa_supplicant, which can cause this problem.
wpa_supplicant have to be started with the '-u' parameter (enable DBus support) or NM's wifi support will not work at all. nmcli will return "unmanaged" for wifi interfaces when this happens.
NM supports most network interfaces types nowadays, you do not need to mix it with other network manager software (wicd, net_applet, ifplugd, etc). Most of the time those programs will conflict with NM and things may not work. So choose one of them and disable the others.
Some distributions disables NM support for one or more specific network interfaces. If you are migrating from one of the network manager software cited in the last item you must make sure NM is enabled to manage your network interfaces. Usually the file /etc/network/interfaces is reponsable for this configuration. In Gentoo, the distribution I use, the file is /etc/conf.d/net.
There are two versions of Plasma NM, one for NM-0.8 and other for NM-0.9. Of course, you must use the correct one for you NM installation.
If the message "We need NetworkManager version >= x.y.z to work, found ''" appears in Plasma NM's main window that probably means NM is not running (the version found is an empty string).
Make sure to use the correct Solid's NM backend for your network manager software. Solid supports NetworkManager 0.7/0.8, NetworkManager 0.9 and Wicd). Go to systemsettings -> Information Sources and make sure you are using the NetworkManager-0.9 backend.
There is a "Fake NetworkManager-0.9" backend introduced in KDE SC 4.7.1. That backend provides network status information to kdelibs's Solid::Networking::status() call and only network status information, which is not enough to make Plasmsa NM/nm09 work. If that backend is listed as the first in systemsettings -> Information Sources you must change the configuration to make NetworkManager-0.9 backend to be the first. The reason to introduce that backend in 4.7.1 is because kdelib's Solid::Networking API is not able to use the NM backend in Plasma NM/nm09 repository (binary compatiliby issues).
The shared connection feature does not work if you are running a name server (bind, dnsmasq) or a dhcp server (dhcpd) in the same computer. That is because NM needs to start dnsmasq with the correct parameters, since dnsmasq is a name server it needs to bind to port 53. If there is another process bound to that port (bind or another dnsmasq instance) dnsmasq is going to fail to start. dnasmasq is also a dhcp server, running two dhcp servers in the same computer can cause conflicts that can prevent the shared connection to work properly.
Sometimes reloading the wifi driver can make shared connections work.

Plasma NM: bugs closed after 4.7.0

2011-09-06T16:29:00.004-03:00

Now that NetworkManager 0.9.0 was released it is the perfect time to deprecate Plasma NM for NM-0.8.x, which resides in our branch master. There are some bugs in Plasma NM that only happen with NM-0.8 and since our team is small (in number, not in spirit) we need to concentrate efforts on what really matters. New features have been added to branch nm09 only for quite some time, all Plasma NM developers use only branch nm09 AFAIK, so please migrate to NM-0.9 as soon as possible :-)

Also keep in mind that the monolithic knetworkmanager is unmaintained since early this year. Everybody should have migrated to the plasmoid version of KDE's Network Management (Plasma NM) by now. There will be no monolithic version in branch nm09 by my part. The current monolithic knetworkmanager code do not even compile because of the changes I had to do when I imported Solid's NetworkManager backend to branch nm09 months ago. If anybody wants to take the task of maintaining the monolithic version feel free to contact me. The plasmoid and monolithic versions share about 85% of code, so it is not a huge task, but since I am already busy fixing/implementing new features in Plasma NM and doing my real life work (Android, nothing related to KDE, unfortunately) I do not have the time to do it myself. By the way, if anybody knows about a position to work on something related to KDE, I can send my CV :-)

Ah, the minimum NM version required for Plasma NM/nm09 has been increased to 0.9.0 because of the fix for bug #276486, which is an upstream bug by the way.

All said here is the traditional list of bugs closed since my last post. First for branch nm09:

209464: make hidden wifi networks work. This bug used to be our most hated bug, now we need a new one :-)
249872: Show overlay icon in system tray to indicate that at least one VPN connection is active, also adds that information in systray's tool tip along with all active VPN connection's names.
281074: prevents crash when ethernet carrier goes off in wired connections.
275502: sort connection list by type, then by activation state and then by connection name (or ssid if applicable).
. fix handling of network appearance/disappearance in ScanWidget.
. fix build on Fedora 15 which doesn't have the latest NM 0.9 yet
280913: don't send empty OpenConnect secrets to NM.
259284: show band and channel in ScanWidget/details.
280873: prevents crash when configuring WEP access point using networkmanagement_configshell.
280701: treat ad-hoc connections as normal wifi connections in connection list.
. update BSSID's tooltip and what's this in wireless edit dialog.
. add support for allowing/forbidding GSM roaming.
. add support for 802.1x subject_match and altsubject_match setting introduced in NetworkManager 0.9.0.
279676, 280494: ignore other non-binary compatible backends (NM-0.8 and Wicd) to prevent crashes.
. when in WDS mode there will be several access points with the same ssid, choose the one with strongest signal instead of the first one found when selecting the BSSID.
. add option to mark the GSM PIN as "Not Required" for devices that do not have the PIN set.
. add one tooltip for the the Show More button and one for the system connection checkbox in edit connection dialog.
. make shared connections easier to setup: the "add" button in wired and wireless tabs in Manage Connection widget is now a menu button with two options: Wired / Shared and Wireless / Shared. Also, unneeded widgets are hidden in wireless dialog when adding a shared wireless connection.
. simplify wireless edit dialog.
. use the correct column when updating the LastUsed info in Manage Connection widget.
. prevents crash when disabling the bluetooth controller with interface details opened for a bluetooth device. Also adds missing method setModemCardIface to Solid's NM frontend.
. automatically adds logged username to connection's permissions when changing connection from system scope to user scope. Without this change users would have to add the login name manually. If they forget to do so then the connection will not change from system to user scope and there will be no warning or error message about that.
. make WEP key validation work.
. fix VPN settings dialogs.
. disable NetworkManager going offline notification by default.
. fix crash when creating connections with networkmanagement_configshell.
. watch for kded restarts, call FinishInitialization to activate notifications.
. allow deactivating a connection while it's activating.
. display the AP's strength in its tooltip.
. let the user decide if he wants to store his 802.1x passwords or type them in every time, add real auth dialogs for 802.1x and wireless (needed for LEAP).
. don't copy certificates for 802-1x connections to our own storage to prevent conflicts with other NM's clients (i.e. nm-applet).
. set Connections entry in networkmanagementrc file to empty after importing NM-0.8 connections. The old files are still instact in case someone needs to redo the importing process.
277889: fix crash when trying to connect to wpa.enterprise eduroam.

That sums up to 33 entries. 6 of them are crash fixes, 8 are bug fixes (including minor bugs), the other 19 are new features (including small features). So, in despite of the name "bugs" they are mostly new features.

Now for branch master:

281074: prevents crash when ethernet carrier goes off in wired connections.
280826: fix plasma Shell crush after the mobile boardband connection stoping.
280701: treat ad-hoc connections as normal wifi connections in connection list.
. when in WDS mode there will be several access points with the same ssid, choose the one with strongest signal instead of the first one found when selecting the BSSID.
. add one tooltip for the the Show More button and one for the system connection checkbox in edit connection dialog.

. simplify wireless edit dialog.

. use the correct column when updating the LastUsed info in Manage Connection widget.

. prevents crash when disabling the bluetooth controller with interface details opened for a bluetooth device. Also adds missing method setModemCardIface to Solid's NM frontend.

. remove obsolete user-name stuff from OpenVPN.
. fix loading/saving of VPN connections.

. disable NetworkManager going offline notification by default.

Slackshow, iptraf and 3G

2011-08-29T00:34:00.001-03:00

Yesterday I presented an Introduction to Qt Programming mini-course in Slackshow 2011. Slackshow is the annual Brazilian Slackware users meeting, which this year took place in Belo Horizonte city at FUMEC faculty. Months ago one of the organizers, Renato Gravino, invited me to present a lecture and so I did :-) People at the event was very entusiastic and I think people enjoyed the mini-course. I did not take any photos, sorry. I was entertained presenting the mini-course and talking to people.

After finishing my presentation I want to the third floor to watch the final presentation about kernel driver writing. When I am not fixing bugs in Plasmas NM sometimes I also fix bugs in the Linux kernel, one of them even required me to rewrite almost half of my webcam's driver some years ago. During the question section at the end of the presentation one of the attendees asked why iptraf (or iptraf-ng for the matter) does not work with his 3G modem. Well, I have the answer for that. For those who do not know iptraf is a ncurses program to monitor network interfaces:

iptraf is not maintained anymore. Sometime ago someone created iptraf-ng (iptraf next generation), a fork of iptraf, as an alternative to keep using iptraf. Well, the fact is that iptraf and iptraf-ng do not search for USB network interfaces, which are used by several 3G modems nowadays. You need to apply this patch I created and recompile iptraf to fix the problem. Yesterday I sent the patch to iptraf-ng's maintainer, let's seen how much time it will take for it to be applied.

iptraf also requires CONFIG_USB_MON=y in kernel's configuration to monitor USB interfaces. Probably this is the default setting in most kernel's out there, but it was not in mine when I first faced this problem.

If you still use iptraf / iptraf-ng and 3G modem enjoy iptraf working with your modem :-) And thanks for Slackshow's organizers for inviting me for the event.

Wireless sharing with Plasma NM 0.9 (part 2)

2011-08-19T15:23:00.002-03:00

In my last post about shared connections I asked how I could make shared connections easier to setup. I have received some suggestions, but some of them were not that easy to implement (drag'n drop one connection onto an interface widget in Plasma NM's main window) or still not easy to understand how to use. Then I got an idea to just add a new entry in the "Add" button, similar to when creating VPN connections. I am here to ask what you all think about this change to the connection editor:

And after selecting the "Shared" option:

You still can use the normal dialog to create wireless shared connections, but the unneeded widgets will not be hidden and the dialog will look like this:

Now the user just need to click on the OK button to finish the setup. The default configuration is to use no encryption, you still need to go to the Wireless Security tab to setup the encrytion key. You can also create wired shared connections in the same way.

The patch has not been commited yet, I want to hear your oppinions before I commit it.

Wireless sharing with Plasma NM 0.9

2011-08-12T07:55:00.004-03:00

During Desktop Summit in Berlin some people asked me how to make wireless sharing work. Connection sharing allows to use a computer as gateway for other computers, NM does that by routing all IP packages from one network interface to the default route of your computer (yes, that is a Masquerate configuration). For example, you can configure your notebook to access Internet through ethernet cable and create a wifi shared connection to allow other computers to access Internet using your notebook's default route. Your notebook will act like an access point.

Here are the steps I use with NM-0.9:

Create an ad-hoc connection:
Go to IPv4 tab and change the method to "shared":
If you prefer you can also use WEP encrytion, just go to "Wireless Security" tab, fill in the hexadecimal key or passphrase and click Ok:
Go to the main window, click on the connection, and wait a few seconds until it is activated:

Sometimes my connection does not activate and NetworkManager shows this warning in its log:

NetworkManager[25305]: Activation (wlan0/wireless): association took too long, failing activation.

rmmod'ing the wifi's kernel module and loading it again usually solves this problem for me.

To use WPA instead of WEP in shared connections NM must change wireless card mode to "master", which is only possible when using hostapd (AFAIK). Unfortunately NM does not support using hostapd yet, so it is also not possible to use WPA in shared connections.

People also asked me to simplify the steps to create shared connections. Well, I am open to suggestions. Adding a checkbox or combobox in connection edit dialog is not a good idea. We already have too many options there, I really do not want to add one more widget to do just the only two required configuration changes (in ethernet case it is just one change) to convert a normal connection to a shared connection.

Desktop Summit 2011

2011-08-05T16:47:00.000-03:00

I am already in Berlin. Gorgeous city and impressive too. I did not make it to c-base before 21:00 so I will have to register tomorrow :-/ Well, now let's sleep, more than 24h of traveling is exausting, specially because I do not sleep during flights, so it is also more than 24h without sleeping. Zzzzzzz

Plasma NM: bugs fixed after 4.6.5

2011-07-27T15:15:00.000-03:00

Below is the list of bugs fixed between 4.6.5 release date (July 5th) and 4.7.0 release date (July 27th). If you want to read the list of bugs fixed before that read my last post bugs fixed in Plasma NM.

. Changes networkmanagement_configshell to update an existing bluetooth connection instead of adding a second one.
. Force NM to update a connection when it's name changes instead of creating a new connection file in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ with the name uuid.
. Set correct uuid when updating connection.
278231: Fix problem with modem HUAWEI E220 not working without auto-connect attribute
. Fix notifications localization.
. Fix user being unable to launch configshell from plasmoid after running ManageConnectionWidget from within Plasma.
253317: Fix edit connection dialog blocks plasma.
. Fill in the file name filter in kfile dialog when importing VPN configurations so that users can know what file extensions are supported.
276406: Fix closing network manager config window before dismissing policykit prompt results in crash.

And for nm09 branch:

277889: Fixes crash when editing connections.
194099: Support for importing/exporting OpenVPN connections.

. Changes networkmanagement_configshell to update an existing bluetooth connection instead of adding a second one.

. Force NM to update a connection when it's name changes instead of creating a new connection file in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ with the name uuid.

. Fix NM-0.8's connection importer which was broken since last month.

. Set correct uuid when updating connection.

. Fix show passwords checkbox in vpnc widget

278231: Fix problem with modem HUAWEI E220 not working without auto-connect attribute.

. Initialize VPN buttons only once per session in ManageConnectionWidget.

. Fix notifications localization.

. Fix user being unable to launch configshell from plasmoid after running ManageConnectionWidget from within Plasma.

253317: Fix edit connection dialog blocks plasma.

. Add support for all the options NM vpnc plugin supports.

269951, 277354: Port all VPN-Plugins which support this to the new secrets flags system. Add auth-dialogs for OpenVPN and PTTP. Fix some minor bugs.

271491: Calculates connection list item's height based on default font height. Minimum height is 28 pixels.

. Improves error message report when importing VPN configuration file.

219118: Add support for vpnc hybrid authentication.

. Disables hidden item until hidden essid is fully working. It seems NM-0.9 can dectect them by itself, so I think we will not need to use this in.

. Fill in the file name filter in kfile dialog when importing VPN configurations so that users can know what file extensions are supported.

. Do not "showMore" when wireless is disabled.

251214: Show error if Gsm PIN/PUK unlock fails.

246327: Add option to show network speed in KB/s or KBits/s in interface details widget.

182451: Indicate active connections in Manager Connections widget. Still does not work for VPN connections.

Recommend snapshots:

For master branch: bb6e3b82dd23f05df8d875627622195e291b5a6d

For nm09 branch: eb9a97abe1cb8dc848939514b5ead0be2a92cecc

E-sata, solid, and udisks (part 2)

2011-07-27T14:59:00.001-03:00

In my first post about e-sata, solid and udisks I wrote about how to hack udisks to inform solid that a disk attached to a specified sata port is actually a removable disk. Udisks-1.0.3 includes a modified patch that allows to do that without applying the patch ourselves. We still need to add the udev rule to indicate which sata port is to be considered "non system internal". The udev rules is slightly diferent from the one I wrote about in my last Solid post:

File /etc/udev/rules.d/99-esata.rules

DEVPATH=="/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/*", ENV{UDISKS_SYSTEM_INTERNAL}="0"

Change the DEVPATH to match your e-sata port. You can find it using the command:

Code

evolucao ~ # find /sys/devices/ -name sdb
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/target4:0:0/4:0:0:0/block/sdb

Then reload udev rules after creating/editing the file above: udevadm control --reload-rules

Now the bad news: udisks includes several attributes to a disk, among then are "system internal" and "removable". Removable means removable media (like optical discs, card readers, etc). System internal means the device is "fixed" to the computer, it cannot be removed without turning the computer off, like sata disks. E-sata is in between those two, for sure it is not system internal and technically it is not removable media according to udisks criteria too.

Currently Solid uses udisks' eject command to eject e-sata disks but since an e-sata disk is not removable media and the disk has not actually been removed (detached from the e-sata port) udisks signals that a new disk is available and kded remounts the disk right after the eject command succeeds (bug #277517).

We could use udisks' detach command instead of eject, but udisks seems to refuse to use it with devices with removable flag set to false, which is the case for e-sata disks. Anyway, sometimes we just want to unmount the partition but not turn the disk off, in that case udisks' detach command is inadequate since you will need to turn the disk off and on to use it again.

I think: 1. Solid should stop using udisks' eject command for e-sata partitions (/dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2, etc) and use the umount command instead. 2. For the entire e-sata disk (/dev/sdb) we should use udisks' detach command, but that will only work when 3. someone fixes udisks to allow executing the detach command for all non system internal devices and not only for the removable ones.

We can do #1 right now. #2 requires some GUI to call the detach command, something that can be used in device notifier plasmoid. #3 is upstream bug :-/

When I have more time I will try to solve this, but for now I am busy and with a dead line approaching, so if someone wants to take the task to fix this problem feel free to do it.

Some clarifications about Plasma NM usage

2011-07-15T20:03:00.003-03:00

I was reading this blog post and felt that I had to explain some things to Plasma NM users. Firstly, the easiest way to add a wifi connection is by clicking on the tray icon, then on the connection name, fill in the encryption key (if necessary) and click Ok. Three clicks, the same number as MacOS like the other blog's owner described.

When you click on the tray icon and there is no wifi connection configured the "Show More" button is automatically toggled:

Clicking on my home network:

Writing encryption key and set it to connect automatically:

And after clicking on Ok button:

Here you can see that the "Show More" button is not toggled anymore because now there is a wifi connection configured. This is done to prevent the connection list to be crowed. You can always list all APs available by clicking on the "Show More" button.

One obvious problem in the connection list is that it is not sorted in any way. I already tried to solve this problem but I will have to refactor some internal classes before I can implement it efficiently. Toggling the connection list is CPU intensive because the way it is implemented.

Quoting same statements from the other blog:

"You connect not by clicking on an available network, you do it by clicking network manager."

This is not true, you can click on the available network too. The bug that prevent it from working was fixed three months ago. What must be your problem is that your distribution, OpenSuse, includes a very old Plasma NM snapshot from November of last year in OpenSuse 11.4. There have been dozens of bugs solved since then, including that one. If you want to use a more up to date Plasma you must upgrade your OpenSuse packages or compile Plasma NM by yourself. Honestly I prefer to compile it, it is easy and even today OpenSuse and other distributions are a bit slow to catch up with all the bugfixing that is going on in Plasma NM. For instance, the packages in the link above are more than two months old now, if you take into account there have been two KDE SC releases during that period that is a bit old.

If you want to compile Plasma NM by yourself do the following:

install git, make, g++, cmake, qt devel libs, kdelibs devel, kde-workspace devel, NetworkManager devel and their dependencies.
Execute: git clone git://anongit.kde.org/networkmanagement.git
mkdir networkmanagement/build
cd networkmanagement/build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
make
make install
That is it.

If you want to use the NM-0.9 execute 'git checkout nm09' before step #5.

"Later, to finish the process, I need to hit OK a couple of times and then I get back to the desktop. But I am not connected yet. I need to go back to the Wireless icon on the system tray and now I am able to see the new connection I added through the prior steps. Once I click on it, the setup will finally end by connecting to the wireless network."

You did not checked the "Connect automatically" checkbox. NetworkManager will not connect automatically without that. I wrote NetworkManager because it is NetworkManager daemon and not Plasma NM (nor nm-applet) that triggers the auto-connection process. Only the manual connection process is triggered by NM's clients (Plasma NM, nm-applet, etc). Some people have already complained about the connection editing process, but I do not plan to change it anytime soon.

One user commented in the other blog: "I also still have problems with knetworkmanager/plasmoid, mostly because of creating new connections. for example I am still unable to create "system connections", because that checkbox is greyed out, and there is no possibility (perhaps except login as root) to activate it."

This is not a Plasma NM bug, it is your distribution that disabled "system connection" checkbox. We have nothing to do with it. Ubuntu is one distribution I know that does disable the "system connection" checkbox.

Another user mentioned the fact that kwallet asks for password to open it. Well, you can disable kwallet's password and that is it. But what would be cool is if kwallet is opened when user logs in kdm. Well, someone is working it: KDE bug about single sign-on. Unfortunately things are too calm in that bug entry. I hope the guy that has been working on that bug has not given up.

Another problem we from Plasma NM face is the fact the NetworkManager specification lacks some details that are crutial to make things work properly, specially with VPN. NetworkManager thoroughly tests all connection parameters and invalidades the connection if one check fails. The problem is that there is no documentation about the tests. The only way we can know for sure which setting is allowed in a connection is reading NetworkManager's source code, which is not easy to read. After several times having to resort to reading NM's source code I can say I am getting used to it. Two weeks ago I even sent a patch to NM mailing list to partially fix this nasty bug. Now I just need NetworkManager's maintainers to apply the patch or improve it and finally fix the problem that prevents Plasma NM nm09 to change connection secrets (encrpytion keys, passwords, etc). We follow NM-0.9's specification but it seems NM daemon does not when it calls the secret agent to save the old secrets instead of the new ones. If you are wondering why this problem does not happen with nm-applet, I also would like to know why. The fact that nm-applet and NetworkManager share the same developers makes things easier for nm-applet, of course.

Plasma NM still have several bugs to fix and features to implement. We are working on them when possible, some are more easier to fix so they are being fixed first. From time to time we implement a new feature in the nm09 branch, if it is easy to backport it we backport it to master, where NM-0.8 code is. I know, we need to move the NM-0.8 code from master to a nm08 branch, someday we are going to do it.

By the way, last Wednesday was my anniversary :-D in the International day of Rock, oh yeah!!! hehe.

Plasma NM: bugs fixed after 4.6.4

2011-07-04T00:59:00.002-03:00

Following my last post about bugs fixed in Plasma NM, here is the list of bugs fixed between 4.6.4 release date (June 10th) and 4.6.5 release date (July 5th):

269951: Save username from VPN configuration instead of defaulting to system's user name.
. Correctly initialize the Wireless80211WidgetBand spinbox.
. Use correct method to enable mobile broadband modems, this one works with non-root users.
273762: Fill in Wireless80211Widget and WirelessSecuritySettingWidget with access point info when selecting one in ScanWidget.
269250: Makes kded module starts to emit notifications only after the plasmoid has been created.

And for nm09 branch:

. Send an error DBus reply to NM if secrets retrieval fails.
226028: Add OpenConnect VPN plugin.
276631: Fix crash while configuring wifi.
. Do not insert empty usernames in VPN settings, which would invalidate the connection.
269951: Change Nm08 connection importer to read the "UserName" setting. The VPN connection's configuration must be set to use this setting or NM will refuse the connection.
276189: Fix crash.
. Add Plasma NM version in kcm window.
. Use correct method to enable mobile broadband modems, this one works with non-root users.
. Update strongswan plugin for strongswan 1.2, add key direction to openvpn.
. Add missing hashing algorithms to openVPN.
. Add missing openVPN options.

. Allow band and channel selection for infrastructure networks, add automatic options for band and channel.

. Fix/update VPN NAT mode traversal.

273762: Fill in Wireless80211Widget and WirelessSecuritySettingWidget with access point info when selecting one in ScanWidget.

149030: move secrets from one storage to another if the storage type is changed and delete secrets in old storage.

269250: Makes kded module starts to emit notifications only after the plasmoid has been created.

. Let user decide if he/she wants to store GSM PIN or type it in every time. The default is not save the PIN.

. Fix reparsing configuration when secretstorage is called.

. Make VPN connections work.

Some observations about nm09 branch:

Old NM-0.8 connections are not deleted until we fix bug http://bugs.kde.org/276485.
Downgrading required minium NM version to 0.8.999 since NM >= 0.8.9997 are problematic. See bugs 276004, 276485, and 276486.

Plasma NM: NM-0.9 (status)

2011-06-03T18:45:00.007-03:00

After answering a comment in bugs.kde.org I thought it would be usefull to make the text below more visible to everybody. Plasma NM version numbers are confusing users in this transition between NM-0.8.x and NM-0.9 so let me try to explain some things:

Today there are four Plasma NM versions:

1. Plasma NM for NM-0.8: this one have been in version 0.9 for several years now (even before NM-0.9 was announced), it is supported by us (Plasma NM developers) and is the Plasma NM version shipped by almost all distributions, usually with version 0.9 in its package version although it does *not* work with NM-0.9.

Plasma NM uses Solid's NetworkManager backend to talk to NetworkManager. The directory /usr/src/debug/kdebase-workspace-4.6.3/x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu/solid/networkmanager-0.7/ mentioned in the crash log in the bug entry is the Solid's backend, which is *not* part of Plasma NM source code. In despite of the 0.7 version number the Solid's backend works with both NM-0.7 and NM-0.8. I know, that is confusing already, but there is more...

2. Fedora's own solution to make Plasma NM (for *NM-0.8*) work with *NM-0.9*: this is an in house solution developed by Fedora to make #1 work with NM-0.9. This is the package the bug's reporter uses and it is not supported by us. Fedora guys created that solution because their release schedule did not allow them to wait for us (Plasma NM developers) to create an official solution and they had to ship NM-0.9 because gnome-shell's network management applet requires it. This version is a temporary solution and is going to be phased out when our official solution is ready.

So basicaly the bug's reporter's Plasma NM version 0.9, created to work with NetworkManager 0.8 and Solid's 0.7 backend, has been modified by Fedora guys to talk to NetworkManager 0.9 :-) That is confusing.

3. Plasma NM/branch nm09: this is our intermediate implementation for NM-0.9. Of course it is supported by us. As far as I know Fedora and Arch Linux are the only distributions that ship this version. Fedora 15 includes this one in kde-unstable repository and is the version they ship in Rawhide, the development branch of the next Fedora release.

Solid's 0.9 backend is included in Plasma NM/nm09 branch, so everything here is 0.9: Plasma NM version 0.9, created to work with NetworkManager 0.9 and Solid's 0.9 backend, talks to NetworkManager 0.9 :-) When everybody stops using NM-0.8 things are going to go back to normal, I hope.

4. Plasma NM/branch libnm-qt: this is going to be our official implemenation for NM-0.9. Of course this one is also supported by us, it is not ready yet, I have never tested it myself, and probably no distribution ships it. libnm-qt (version 0.9 I hope) is the replacement for Solid's NM backed 0.9 and simplifies the source code for us developers. There is no user visible differences between #3 and #4 since only the backend is different, the user interface is the same.

The last two are in development stage. I use #3 in my notebook with almost no problems. I just need to clean up the source code and fix one problem with system VPN connections (user VPN connections work). There is also some TODO's in #3 but most people probably do not need them yet and they can be implemented without disturbing users like we have been doing in master branch.

Some people asked me what version they should use. Well, #1 is the only one that works with NM-0.8 so there is no choice here. For NM-0.9 use #3, like me, since #4 is not ready yet. But there is a catch: #3 does not migrate NM-0.8 configuration to NM-0.9 format yet, so you will have to recreate all your connections, that is also the reason Fedora makes it available in kde-unstable instead of kde-testing repository. Since only Fedora ships #2, I think Fedora users should use #2 because there is no settings migration to be done like in #3 and #4. There is no migration between #3 to #4, they use the same configuration files.

I hope this explains the version number mess in Plasma NM. So basically NM-0.9 is our opportunity to make everything use the same version number.

Update: I have implemented in #3 the code to import the Plasma NM's configuration files used in #1 (NM-0.8), just do:

qdbus org.kde.networkmanagement /org/kde/networkmanagement org.kde.networkmanagement.ImportNm08Connections

The qdbus call above is one shot, you will have to restart kded4 to be able to trigger it again. The old configuration files are not deleted so that you can import the connections again, but if you delete the connection using Plasma NM's connection editor the secrets in kwallet will be deleted forever.

When the importer is well tested I am going to change the code to delete the old configuration files.

Update: importer is enabled by default now but old configuration files will not be deleted because of those two nasty bugs. NetworkManager calls our secret agent to save the wrong password, I do not know why that is happening. Last weekd I send an e-mail to NM mailing list asking for help but nobody has answered it yet.

Plasma NM: bugs fixed after 4.6.3

2011-05-31T22:45:00.002-03:00

Well, the number of crashes is decreasing, that is a good signal :-)

Following my last post about bugs fixed in Plasma NM, here is the list of bugs fixed between 4.6.3 release date (May 6th) and 4.6.4 release date (June 10th):

. Fix NM version number check.
. Always shows the "Create connection" button in the interface added notification for modem interfaces. Until now it was only shown when there was no modem connection.
275163: Fix changing adapter display type disables networking system
275159: Disables "Show More" button instead of hidding it if there is no wireless interface available.
275160: Defaults to wired tab in ManageConnectionWidgets if wireless is disabled.
274702 275161: Try to prevent opening kwallet when there is no secret to retrieve.
274797: Set right widget's width to fixed size to prevent unneeded graphical layout resizes.
146159 182984: Import VPN connections from configuration files. Only VPNC is implemented so far, but the hooks for other VPN types are in place now.
. Fix initial default route icon's state when starting kded module and a connection is already active.
274860: Change networkmanagement_shell into a singleton to prevent calling the edit connection dialog multiple times.
274859: Disable "Low signal strength" notification by default and increase the interval between "Low signal strenght" notifications to 5 minutes.
274846: Backport fix for disconnecting auto-connect connections when compiled against Solid < 4.7.0.
. Fix some issues when entering wireless channel manually instead of using the spinbox buttons.
. Add text in main window to warn when using Plasma NM with wrong NM version.
274161: Prevents crash when configuring 3G modem.
273894: Prevent crashes when closing kcmshell too fast after closing the connection editor.
. Fix two crashes when editing IPv4 config.
273955: Prevents dangling pointer crash.
266268: Try to adjust plasmoid size automatically.
273265: Fix crash on editing connections in KCM module.
. Update main CMakeLists.txt file to indicate that now we need at least NetworkManager-0.8.1. That is because of the IPv6 implementation, which first appeared in 0.8.1.
. Fix UUID check for DUN and NAP services in networkmanagement_configshell which prevented adding new Bluetooth connections.
272942: Change the automatic launching of Mobile Connection Wizard into a notification.
157384: Allow automatically set connection's BSSID to the BSSID of the AP selected in scanwidget.
272841: Fix crash when clicking on the VPN interface.
254155: Prevent graphical artifact during tab transition in m_interfaceDetailsWidget.
228298: Show correct WEP key type (Passphrase/Hex) when editing/showing connection secrets.
272774: Wrap interface label in InterfaceItem class, now only the first line is displayed.
. Several memory leak fixes.

Plasma NM: NM-0.9 (WORKING)

2011-05-15T03:23:00.024-03:00

Hi all, as I said in another post I have spent last Saturday (May 14th) and Sunday (May 15th) trying to improve NetworkManager-0.9 support in Plasma NM. The situation before May 14th was a follow: networkmanagement/master compiles/works with NM-0.8.1 and above. Branch networkmanagement/nm09 compiles against NM-0.8.x but needs several hacks to work with NM-0.9. Plasma NM uses Solid's NetworkManager and ModemManager backends from kde-workspace repository. Since 4.6.0 the NetworkManager backend uses the ModemManager backend for Bluetooth/Gsm network interfaces.

I have heard of two other attempts to bring/improve NM-0.9 support to Plasma NM. The first one is from Fedora guys and even them admit that it is not ideal. The other is from Will Stephenson, the Plasma NM maintainer and who most people here already know, including me, hi Will :-). Well, I do not know how much time Will's libnm-qt is going to take to be ready to be used in Plasma NM so I am doing what I proposed last month:

Create the new Solid's NM-0.9 backend outside kde-workspace repository so that we could change it freely without KDE's freature freeze/ABI restrictions. (DONE)
Make it compile against NM-0.8.999. (DONE)
Remove #ifdef COMPILE_MODEM_MANAGER_SUPPORT and #ifdef NM_0_8 from the source code. (DONE)
Make everything compile/work when the old NM-0.7 backend from KDE SC 4.{6,7} is installed. (DONE)
Create code to import existing NM-0.8 connections to NM-0.9. (DONE)
Make it really work with NM0-0.8.999. (ALMOST DONE)
Convert code to use libnm-qt instead of Solid::Control::*Nm09. (IN PROGRESS)
Improve support for Pppoe (Pots in NM-0.9 terminology), Cdma and IPv6. (TO BE DONE)
Implement the new interface types: LTE, Wimax and OlpcMesh. (TO BE DONE)

Item #3 means Plasma NM requires at least KDE SC 4.6.0 to compile now. Item #4 means I can connect to my VPNC, ethernet, WPA wifi and 3G/Gsm connections, probably bluetooth is also working since it is very similar to 3G/Gsm, but I have not tested it. Item #6 depends on NetworkManager guys since Pppoe support is still in progress there. Item #7 may take a long time since I do not have any of those equipaments to do tests, the same is true for Cdma and IPv6.

Update: VPN works now after Ilia Kats implemented the secrets agent from NM-0.9 specification, Lukáš Tinkl changed the DBus types used to (de)marshall objects in QtDBus, and I created the SecretsObject needed to get the secrets from kwallet/kconfig and fixed another bug that prevented the secret types ("always ask", "saved", "not required") to work properly.

Secrets (passwords, Gsm PIN, wifi/vpn encryption keys) can now be saved in KDE session using kwallet (encrypted) or in (plain text) Plasma NM's configuration file. When creating or editing a connection check the checkbox "System connection" to make them be saved in (plain text) NM configuration files. The default is to save them in KDE session, which means a connection with secrets requires Plasma NM running to work. Connections without secrets work without Plasma NM running reggardless if the "System connection" checkbox is checked or not. Maybe we can improve the user interface to make that clearer.

The new backend is going to support only NM-0.9 and it keeps the old Solid::Control namespace. I have just duplicated the classes used in NM-0.7 backend with a Nm09 suffix to distinguish them, so Solid::Control namespace is more inflated now, sorry hehe. The new headers for Solid::Control::*Nm09 classes are installed in $KDEDIR/include/solid/controlnm09 to do not clash with the old ones in KDE SC. When Will finishes his libnm-qt we are going to remove the Solid::Control namespace (at last), which probably is going to happen before KDE SC 4.7.0 release.

I commited the code to nm09 branch in May 16th. If you are a programmer and want to help fix the remaining bugs please test it. If you are a user that wants a rock solid network connection just wait until we fix the most obvious bugs, this code is not for you yet. Expect crashes, instability and missing features when using this code. Update: thanks to whoever fixed the connection editing problem :-)

Plasma NM: Bluetooth tethering

2011-04-24T06:27:00.015-03:00

Two weeks ago Alex Fiestas contacted me for us to fix one of the often requested features in Bluedevil: tethering (use of a bluetooth device, usually a cell phone, to access the Internet wirelessly). Last year during Solid Sprint in Madrid he and Will Stephenson worked on that (I also helped) but we still did not figure out how to make it work as easily as possible. Well, we are getting close...

Tethering needs support from both Bluedevil and Plasma NM, and they must cooperate to a certain degree to register the connection in NetworkManager. After some research and some answers from the NetworkManager's guys we finally got the information we needed. Most of the needed code went to Plasma NM and Solid, the Bluedevil part was already almost done.

To keep the story short here is the screenshot of a tethering connection in Plasma NM:

Things to notice:

I am using a bluetooth icon for the network interface, which is logical since NetworkManager identifies it as bluetooth. The only problem is that it can get mixed up with the Bluedevil icon in systray. Maybe someone can create a different icon, volunteers? ;-)
The "Unknown" word in connection name refers to the unknown access technology used. It seems ModemManager is not able to get that information, I will try to figure out if there is another way to get that. Update: ModemManager works with bluetooth devices, the problem is that Plasma NM assumed that ModemManager's objects always existed when there was a NetworkManager object associated to it, which is not true for bluetooth devices. Bluetooth devices always have a NetworkManager object associated to them but the ModemManager object only exists if the org.bluez.Serial.Connect method has been called. The consequence is that Plasma NM is not notified (via Qt's signals) when there is a change in the bluetooth's ModemManager object properties. I will try to fix that in the future. Update2: problem fixed :-)

Here some other things to notice:

System Name works for a serial (ppp) connection! :-) This was an old bug in Plasma NM, the usual NM method to get the interface name returns the serial device (/dev/ttyACM0, /dev/ttyUSB0, etc). The traffic graph also did not work for the same reason. I added a hack to force Plasma NM to always use ppp0 as interface name for all serial devices (Dial-up modem, Gsm/Cdma phones, Bluetooth). Well, now I do not need the hack because NM-0.8.2 can give me that information. Unfortunately the support for that is going to be available only in KDE SC 4.7.0.
For the same reason access technology is not reported, neither are the operator's name and the signal quality. The "Enable" status also comes from ModemManager, if there is no way to get those information I will remove them from interface details in the future. Update: problem source detected, just need some time to fix it. Update2: problem fixed :-)
Yes, mobile broadband in Brazil can be very slow in some places, actually in most cities, even in some neighborhoods in big cities. There are places where it is indeed fast, usually in big cities and some fortunate cities, that is not my case :-/ Here where I live I can get a little above 260 kbps in 3G (220 kbps in 2G) at best for a 300 kbps plan. I do not even bother to get get a faster plan because most operator's networks cannot keep up to the speed and the ones which do are expensive enough to make them not viable :-/

What is still missing:

Cdma phones's bluetooth support (in both Solid and Plasma NM).
PAN (bluetooth's Personal Area Network) support for both Gsm and Cdma phones. Those two is going to take time since my phone is not compatible with Cdma nor PAN. Update: PAN implemented for Gsm phones :-) Actually the service that the phone must support is NAP (Network Access Point) and not PAN. Or PAN always comes with NAP, I am not sure.
Without the bluetooth patch to Solid's NetworkManager backend that is going to be in 4.7.0 Plasma NM will recognise bluetooth interfaces as gsm. The consequence is that Plasma NM mixes Gsm and Bluetooth connections but NM refuses to use pure Gsm connections with Bluetooth interfaces. With the patch in place Plasma NM can distinguish between Gsm and Bluetooth connections. For instance, I have registered one Bluetooth and one Gsm connection in Plasma NM, but only the Bluetooth one is shown in the screenshots above.
Update: Another consequence is that no gsm connection detail (operator's name, signal quality, access technology) is available without the Solid's patch.
No, for now there is no way to use the same registered connection with the same phone connected through USB and Bluetooth. You have to create one connection to be used when the phone is connected through USB and another connection when the phone is connected through Bluetooth.
When the bluetooth controller is active and there is a bluetooth connection registered the bluetooth interface is always shown, even when phone's bluetooth is disabled. That is the way NM works.
Some lines of code in Bluedevil to call Plasma NM to register a bluetooth connection when a bluetooth device has just been paired.
More testing.

For the braves who wants to try the Solid patch:

Get the patch against 4.6.2 here: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/101172
Recompile kdelibs and kde-workspace. Recompiling kdelibs is needed because of the ABI changes in Solid. I had some crashes in kded4 until I recompile kdelibs.
Recompile Plasma NM:
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/netwokmanagement
mkdir networkmanagement/build
cd networkmanagement/build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
make
make install

Update: Bluedevil 1.2 is going to support launching networkmanagement_configshell to create the bluetooth connection, so you will not need to use command line:

If you still wants to lauch it yourself follow these instructions:

Execute: $(kde4-config --path exe --locate networkmanagement_configshell) create --type bluetooth --specific-args "00:11:22:33:44:55 dun" . Pay attention to the quotes (") in "00:11:22:33:44:55 dun", they are required.
Change 00:11:22:33:44:55 to your phone's bluetooth hardware address. You can get it in Bluedevil. Update: Change dun for nap if you want that service.
In a few seconds Plasma NM's Mobile Connection Wizard window should appear and you can finish registering the connection.
After that you can go the Plasma NM window and the connection should be there. Just click on it to connect to the Internet.

You can edit/delete the bluetooth connection in Plasma NM even without the Solid's patch.

Plasma NM: bugs fixed after 4.6.2

2011-04-14T18:39:00.017-03:00

Update: I am going to work more on nm09 branch from now on. The number of people complaining about poor NM-0.9 support is increasing. Unfortunately I am also very busy on other things now so I will have to slow down on Plasma NM bugfixing.

Following my last post about bugs fixed in Plasma NM, here is the list of bugs fixed after 4.6.2 release date (April 6th) and before 4.6.3 release date (May 6th):

209673: Improve 802.1x certificate handling for WPA PEAP connections.
253362: Try to limit the auto-expanding width code used to accomodate the traffic plotter in interface details widget.
258246: dont't show hiddenWirelessNetworItem by default, show it only if showMore is checked or wireless interface details are activated.
257920: Enable setting of custom routes.
270827: Add IPv6 support.
272140: Set timestamp for system connections.
272135: Hover all connections associated to a network interface instead of just the first one found.
272138: Fix problems when changing connection's scope from user to system and vice-versa. Be warned that changing connection's scope is not well tested yet.
272174: Disables connection's hover state when entering interface details tab.
209624: Add Bluetooth Network Access Point (NAP) tethering support for Gsm phones. Thanks Rajeesh K. Nambiar for implementing the patch and testing it with his iPhone 3GS.
264083: Try to unlock (PIN/PUK) and enable modem before connecting to Gsm connections. Also PIN is now one-time only.
194899: Add button in wireless connection editor to copy the current access point's MAC address to BSSID field.
268021: Add notifications for VPN connections.
. Uses KAuth (KDE's Policy Kit wrapper) to authorize users to create/delete/modify system connections.
. Load networkmanagement kded's module on plasmoid startup to make sure it is loaded.
271768: Show notification to warn user if he/she tries to connect when networking or wireless is disabled.
271767: Automatically show other connections in main window if there is no preferred network available.
271765: Add button to configure notifications directly from networkmanager settings.
259351: Avoid dangling pointer when setting signal strength for an access point C++ object that has just been destroyed
253584: Avoid dangling pointer when deleting RemoteInterfaceConnection.
203584. Bluetooth tethering support for Dial-up Network (DUN), tested with my phone (Samsung i8910). CDMA will take more time since I do not have a compatible cell phone to do tests.
. Show essid and MAC address of the active accesspoint in wireless interface details.
249016: Enable additional addresses even on DHCP.
271353: Try harder not to resize the "show more" button. Also all connection widgets do not change its height when toggling "show more" button.
. Fix crash when stopping NetworkManager-0.8.2.
. Various fixes for adhoc support.
204340: Add systemwide connection support for NM 0.8. Many thanks to Gökçen Eraslan and Andrey Borzenkov for working in this patch. There are still some glitches to fix but it mostly works. One problem I noticed happens if NetworkManager is using the ifnet plugin, then one system connection is changed to user connection and back to system connection. The final connection will not be listed until NetworkManager is restarted. This problem does not happen with the keyfile plugin.
270901: Do not show notification for appearing/disappearing access points if already connected to one.
. Monolithic knetworkmanager is unmaintained. Its code is not compiled by default. Please use the plasmoid instead.
. Fix autoconnect sometimes being disabled without user request when connection is explicitly disconnected by the user.
. Fix autoconnect setting not saved after editing connection settings.

We also have a proposal patch for adding IPv6 support to Plasma NM, which would close bug 270827. Well, not everybody have a real IPv6 network (no IPv4 tunneling, IPv6 DHCP server) available to test this patch, so if anybody with such network could test it the patch's author (Ilia Kats) and me would appreciate. Update: patch commited, now we need more real world testing.

Update: last week I confirmed Ilia Kats' KDE developer account and now he is a Plasma NM developer, congratulations :-) That is the least I could do after all the important work he is doing for Plasma NM, such as the ad-hoc fix and IPv6 support among others.

Plasma NM: connection sharing

2011-04-05T18:48:00.002-03:00

Now that the ad-hoc wireless bug has been fixed it is possible to share wired or 3G connection through wireless. To create a shared connection:

Create an ad-hoc connection:
Click on the connection in Plasma NM window and wait.
This dialog will appear, just fill in the passphrase and click Ok:
Wait some seconds and the ad-hoc AP will be started:

I was able to browse the web using my cell phone. The WirelessSharing connection did not appear when I scanned the neighborhood, I had to write the essid manually. Using my current notebook as gateway I was able to connect my old notebook to the Internet too.

E-sata, solid, and udisks

2011-03-30T11:46:00.003-03:00

Last year I wrote about how to hack hal to recognise disks attached to an e-sata port as removable. Now that udisks is the default disk manager in Solid I will explain how to hack udisks to do the same:

The hal hack is just a xml file that overrides disk's removable flag. With udisks things are a bit more complicated. I had to apply this patch to udisks and recompile it. The patch adds the flag UDISKS_FORCE_SYSTEM_INTERNAL, which lets us mark the disk as internal or external (AKA removable).
Restart udisks. Just kill it and it will restart automatically: killall udisks-daemon # as root
After that we need to add an udev rule which will actually mark the disk as removable:

File /etc/udev/rules.d/99-esata.rules

DEVPATH=="/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/*", ENV{UDISKS_FORCE_SYSTEM_INTERNAL}="0"

Code

evolucao ~ # find /sys/devices/ -name sdb
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/target4:0:0/4:0:0:0/block/sdb

Reload udev rules: udevadm control --reload-rules

That is it :-)

There is already a bug entry about the e-sata problem in udisks' bugzilla. In fact, I found the UDISKS_FORCE_SYSTEM_INTERNAL patch in that bug entry.

Plasma NM: bugs fixed

2011-03-27T18:23:00.013-03:00

Since Plasma NM does not follow KDE SC release schedule I thought posting a list of bugs fixed should be a good idea. Some users do not know we do not follows KDE SC release schedule, some distribution packagers also seem to not know which important bugs have been fixed this year.

Fixes commited between 4.6.1 and 4.6.2 release dates (March 4th - April 6th):

212941, 214985: Ah-hoc wireless and connection sharing are working now. Many thanks to Ilia Kats for this patch.
. Now it is possible to click on the AP name (essid) in the main window and Plasma NM will launch the configuration dialog with the essential settings (connection name, essid, encryption type) already filled in and ask for encryption key. After that the user just need to click on the Ok button to complete the configuration.
269853: Opens Mobile Connection Wizard to create a 3G connection when modem is inserted and no 3G connection has been created yet.
208219: Add PEAP-GTC wireless authentication.
257777: do not save secrets if user asked for it.
241798: vpnc: fix storing/loading of secrets type
268484: Do not send "low signal" notification if connection is not activated.
262555: fix missing secrets for VPN plugins without explicit storage type.
243792: fix connecting to WiFi when "In file (unencrypted)" secrets storage is used.
267952: Enable Del key to remove connection.
267967: Sanitize the Networking, Wireless and Wwan checkbox handling.
. Fix changing VPN password type not being recognised until user logout/login.

Fixes commited between 4.6.0 and 4.6.1 release dates (January 26th - March 4th):

267556: Hide the "Enable Wireless" checkbox if there is no wireless interface available.
248348: Fix potential crash.
263286: Enable notifications.
253584: Prevent potential crash.
266807: Comment some code that unnecessarily triggers polkit authentication agent.
264607: Fix crash in Mobile Connection Wizard.
238046: Fix knetworkmanager doesn´t recognize BSSID.
266097: Fix potential crash.
210878: Another try to solve the dangling pointers problem.
. Add support to Wwan (AKA Mobile Broadband) on/off switch.
. Make most of the wifi info work.
. Fix memory leak.
. Insert the right catalogs to translate UI.
. Support to show details for interface usb0.

Fixes commited in 2011 and before 4.6.0 release date:

255855, 261738, 256031: Fix crashes in Mobile Connection Wizard.
255508: Restrict the connection name label in the networkmanagement. Also corrected two typos.
. Default configuration module (kcm) to wireless tab.
. Fix crasher when an interface that's gone unavailable is disconnected.
. Changes to make cmake warns about mobile-broadband-provider-info package presence/omission.

Some important fixes commited last year:

210878: Plasma NM (and Knetworkmanager) crashes when restarting NetworkManager. Note: Not all crash cases have been fixed yet.
244416: New files for VPNC auth UI, VPNC authentication UI allowing one time secrets.
150680: Support password protected keys in OpenVPN.
. Mobile Connection Wizard to create Gsm/Cdma connections commited.

You can get a more detailed list here or cloning the repository and using git log.

Plasma NM: big feature (in progress...)

2011-03-27T17:23:00.001-03:00

System connection implementation is progressing in Plasma NM. Andrey Borzenkov took over the task of maintaining Gökçen Eraslan's system connection implementation. It is working, I am using it right now but it still needs some adjustments before we push it to master branch though. Anybody willing to test it can get the patch in http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/100947. Please report bugs in the system connection bug entry in http://bugs.kde.org/204340.

Meanwhile, I created a nm09 branch to let others, specially Jiří Klimeš and Andrey Borzenkov, implement the necessary changes for NetworkManager-0.9 support. The code in that branch does not work with NetworkManager-0.8, only with NetworkManager-0.9.

Plasma NM: big feature (bigger than I have thought)

2011-03-10T18:25:00.002-03:00

When I got the idea to implement system connections I thought in just fixing a bug, but since NetworkManager is changing its API and ABI during the 0.8 to 0.9 transition the challenge has increased.

The main change from 0.8 to 0.9 specification is that now all connections are system wide with new DBus interfaces for the clients (Plasma NM for instance) to provide secrets (user name, password, encrpyt keys) to NetworkManager. Most of the changes are there to shrink NM's clients (Plasma NM, nm-applet, cnetworkmanager) source code, so it seems to be good change. We will need to change Solid's NM backend to meet the new specificaton, which can be problematic for distributions because they will only be available in KDE SC 4.7, scheduled to be released in late July.

Talking about distributions, one Fedora guy showed up in kde-networkmanagement mailinglist. NM-0.9 is going to be released next week and Fedora guys are thinking in using NM-0.9 in F15, preferably with a working Plasma NM. To do so would require changes in KDE SC 4.6x API used in F15, something that KDE tries really hard to avoid.

One good news is that a guy from Pardus Linux (Gökçen Eraslan) have been working in implementing system connections since last year, I just forgot about that hehe, sorry. So we already have a working implementation but Gökçen Eraslan still have not answered my e-mail about his implemenation. If it is working good with no side-effects we can add it to networkmanagement master repository and starting from there to meet NM 0.9 specification from Plasma NM's point of view. The Solid's NM backend part will need more discussing about how to proceed.

Plasma NM: big feature

2011-03-07T16:46:00.001-03:00

Now that I have commited the read/save plasmoid state patch it is time to implement a big feature. Before that I must say that there is a bug in Solid's NetworkManager backend, it does not emit the wirelessHardwareEnabledChanged signal. Without that signal the "Enable wireless" checkbox does not work as expected, sometimes it gets disabled (read-only), so I suggest that distribution packagers apply this one line patch to fix the problem. The patch will be available in KDE SC 4.6.2.

Turning the big feature, nothing better to implement than the most hated Plasma NM bug: knetworkmanager does not show system connections. I spend last Sunday trying to understand how to list system connections, that part now works:

Now I need to fill in the blanks in the edit dialog:

As I could see in command line NM shows very few information about my ethernet connection:

For instance it does not show the autoconnect state or if the interface should use DHCP or not. I suppose autoconnect and DHCP are default states, so they are not shown.

I think I can finish a working implementation by the end of this week and post it in git.reviewboard.kde.org for suggestions.

Plasma NM: small feature

2011-03-06T00:27:00.000-03:00

In the last days I have been trying to figure out how to "enable" Mobile Broadband modems by default. By "enable" I mean make the modem powers up when it is attached to the computer. NetworkManager and ModemManager require the modem to be "enabled" before using it.

I have always thought it should be something simple like modem = Solid::Control::ModemManager::findModemInterface(...); modem->enable(true). Actually that sample code works... for root only. ModemManager protects most of its DBus interface through policy-kit, so I had to figure out how to do it for normal users without asking for a password. As you probably know, Plasma NM run as normal user, not root. Time to take a look at how nm-applet does that.

After some digging in nm-applet source code I found this function nm_client_wwan_set_enabled. I have never seen that "wwan" interface in NetworkManager specification, the public specification did not mention it some days ago. In the end I figured out wwan is a synonym for mobile broadband. Today I have looked at the specification site again and now there is a 0.9 specification that mentions wwan, although NetworkManager 0.8 supports wwan but the 0.8 specification does not mention that, cool, huh?

Anyway, now that I know those functions are there, I have updated Solid::Control::NetworkManager to make use of them. The changes are already in kde://kde-workspace and kde://networkmanagement, they are going to be available in KDE SC 4.7. The visual changes in Plasma NM are very small, just a new checkbox called "Enable mobile broadband". The checkbox is visible only when there is at least one Gsm/Cdma modem attached. Following the same idea, I have changed the "Enable wireless" checkbox to also be visible only when there is at least one wireless card attached.

When you attach a modem to your computer ModemManager disables it by default. NetworkManager disables wwan if all modems are disabled, which means everytime you attach a modem NM will disable wwan. Even worse, if you have two modems, attach the first, enable wwan, attach the second modem, NM will disable wwan because the last modem is disabled. Nm-applet also demonstrates the same behavior in my tests. I think that explains why sometimes when my notebook is connected through 3G and I attach my cellphone in "PCSuite mode" to my notebook the 3G connection drops. To workaround the enable/disable problem I am using a QTimer::singleShot(...) to enable wwan after NM disables it if the mobile broadband checkbox is checked. Seems to work.

Now that I can enable/disable wwan the next thing to implement is saving the plasmoid configuration. Plasma NM is splitted into two parts, one plasmoid and a kded module. The kded module already saves its configuration, it is responsible to talk to NetworkManager and ModemManager and manages all interfaces. Of course the plasmoid is the user interface, it does not save its configuration yet, that is why everytime you resume from ram or disk the wireless state is on, it is on because your computer's BIOS set it to on, not Plasma NM. Plasma NM just reads the wireless state from NetworkManager.

The plasmoid state is just those three checkbox (Networking, Wireless and Mobile Broadband). I plan to save those three state to a configuration file and restore them when Plasma NM is started or resumes from ram/disk. So if the user set wwan to enable and attaches a modem to his/her computer, the modem will be be enabled after a short flux of DBus calls. Use dbus-monitor to see what I am talking about :-)

Plasma NM: notifications

2011-02-28T02:57:00.001-03:00

Notifications is a feature that several KDE programs use, even the old Knetworkmanager implements it. Plasma NetworkManagement did not implement it, until now. This weekend I have enabled notifications in Plasma NM. Most of the code is shared with Knetworkmanager, so I did not have to implement that much of code. I have also removed two notifications that did not make much sense since a third notification gives the same information.

Three notifications listed in networkmanagement.notifyrc have never been implemented, which also affects the old Knetworkmanager. After a few hours I finished to implement those three notifications. All notifications seem to be working, so, enjoy :-)

As requested here is a screencast of the notifications working. I added some strings to Plasma NM that have not been translated yet (my desktop is in Brazilian Portuguese), so do not worry about the missing string in the activating notification, it will appear once the string is translated. There are some minor improvements that could be done too.

OBS: I reduced my screen resolution from the original 1600x900 to 800x600 to make the fonts readable.

Back to KDE work

2011-02-18T23:29:00.000-02:00

After a couple of months busy with other stuff now I have more time to spent on blogging. During the last weeks I have been working to fix some bugs in Plasma NM (bugs 264607, 266097, 210878), Kopete (bugs 234000, 260892, 263181, 256667, 265811, 266559 and commit 1218860) and kde-workspace (bug 264534 and 231195). All fixes are going to be in KDE SC 4.6.1. There are other bugs I am investigating, not all of them will be fixed by 4.6.1 release date though.

Symbian Modding 2

2011-01-29T22:01:00.006-02:00

I have installed HX-V11 firmware on my phone and like most of it. One thing that I did not like was the theme used by Orange Tsunami homescreen, so I decided to change it a bit using siscontents. This is the result:

Maybe I will change the bottom bar's icons, for now it is almost as I would like it. If you wanna try it the installation file is here. Remove the _.txt file extension before copying it to the phone.

Update: now it is better :-)

Update 2: Tsunami + Widgetizer

Update 3

Samsung i8910 cellphone and Linux

2011-01-21T16:38:00.011-02:00

Synchronizing contacts in the command line

Install program syncml-ds-tool. In my case it comes in the libsyncml-0.5.2 ebuild (package in Gentoo's jargon).
Create an empty directory called contacts.
Connect the i8910 to the USB port in "PC Suite" mode.

Execute the script below:

File sync_contacts.sh

#!/bin/sh
syncml-ds-tool -u 0 --identifier 'PC Suite' --version 1.1 --wbxml \
--username '' --password '' --useStringTable --remoteWinsConflicts \
--slow-sync text/x-vcard Contacts $(pwd)/contacts/

One file per contact will be created in the contacts directory. They are in vCard 2.1 format, you can edit them with your prefered text editor. To upload the changes to the phone:

Delete all contacts from you phone (yes, that is right). To delete them go to Contacts -> Options -> Mark/Unmark -> Mark all, then Options -> Delete.
Execute the same script above.

One alternative to deleting all phone's contacts is removing the "--remoteWinsConflicts" option and executing the script above. I prefer to use the first method because sometimes removing "--remoteWinsConflicts" makes contacts appear twice in the phone or in the contacts directory.

You can use KDE's KAddressbook to edit the contacts. When I have more time I will write how to do that.

Synchronizing contacts using KDE's Akonadi
Well, this is yet to be written since it is not officially working. There is an old version that works somewhat, but is not reliable so we have better wait.

Using the phone as bluetooth modem
If you use Linux and KDE follow the instructions in here, if not keep reading :-)

Ok, now it connects and I can surf the web, I am connected through bluetooth now. What I did:

udev/bluethood do not create the /dev/rfcommX, I had to create it and connect it manually to my phone:

#mknod --mode=666 /dev/rfcomm0 c 216 0
#rfcomm connect 0 <phone's mac address> 4

The number 0 in the rfcomm command means rfcomm0. The number 4 is the channel. To find the correct channel do:

evolucao ~ # sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...
Searching for DUN on 00:23:D4:2E:13:B8 ...
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x1001f
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
   Channel: 4
Language Base Attr List:
  code_ISO639: 0x454e
  encoding: 0x6a
  base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
   Version: 0x0100

DUN means bluetooth dial-up network.

then you can use wvdial: using /dev/rfcomm0 as Modem parameter.

It also works with KDE's Plasma NetworkManagement and ModemManager-0.4:

Using the phone as Bluetooth GPS

To do that you need:

. python and python script shell 2.0.0 signed by Nokia with full capability. Most python install files out there do not have Location capability, which rises "permission denied" errors when any python program tries to access the internal GPS. Probably this also happens with Java programs, which would affect ExtGPS. The needed files are Python_2.0.0.sis and PythonScriptShell_2.0.0_high_capas.sis. Install them on C:

. download s60_as_bt_gps.py and locationrequestor_3rd.sis. I had to add some fixes to s60_as_bt_gps.py to prevent it from crashing. The changes are simple: 1. In line 34 change "import socket" to "import btsocket as socket"; 2. In line 320 add a "if len(args) > 7:", in the following 5 lines add a tab to ident the if (Python requires that to accept the if); 3. In line 332 do the same, add "if len(args) > 13:" and ident all lines until the line with "###########"

. Install the .sis and copy s60_as_bt_gps.py to C:/Data/Python/ using X-plore for instance.

. turn Bluetooth on.

. run Python Scriptshell and from there run s60_as_bt_gps.py.

. click on Options -> Accept Connections.

That is it. The bluetooth service should be available now on channel 10.

Importing GPS data into GoogleEarth
I also managed to import the data into GoogleEarth running in my Linux installation. I have not tried to do that in Windows. I used the information here, although I had to fix the python script available in that page (gegpsd-0.2.py) because the script in the phone exports the GPS data in a different NMEA type. It is not that hard to fix it, you just need to understand the fields in the two NMEA types used by the phone ($GPGGA) and the script ($GPRMC).

To attach the phone's bluetooth NMEA service to Linux you need to execute as root:

rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 00:11:22:33:44:55 10

where 00:11:22:33:44:55 is your phone's bluetooth MAC address and 10 is the channel the 60_as_bt_gps.py script got from Symbian bluetooth service (it may not be 10).

Then you need to edit the gegpsd-0.2.py file and change the serial_port variable to /dev/rfcomm0, the field number 3 to 2 (latitude), 5 to 4 (longitude), 4 to 3 (North/South switch), and 6 to 5 (West/East switch) in the datablock variable, and change $GPRMC to $GPGGA. The $GPGGA type does not indicate speed so you can ignore this value.

Then is just run the gegpsd-0.2.py script and import the gps.kml file available on that page into GoogleEarth. It is a bit slow but it works :-)

Back to work

2010-11-18T09:50:00.000-02:00

After ENSL and Latinoware I am back to work... or kind of, I am going to talk to my current employer tomorrow to decide my future in the company. In the meantime I have fixed one bug in the Mobile Connection Wizard (MCW) which Anselmo, from INdT (Nokia Technology Institute) told me during ENSL conference two weeks ago. Now if MCW finds something wrong opening or parsing the two files it needs to work it will fallback to the old manual configuration dialog. The two mentioned files are /usr/share/zoneinfo/iso3166.tab and /usr/share/mobile-broadband-provider-info/serviceproviders.xml.

Yesterday I tried (again) to fix one crash in Plasma NM when NetworkManager restarts. It seems to work now and without the side effects that forced me to undo the changes last month. I am going to do some more tests and commit the changes later on.

I did not posted about Latinoware's second and third days but I must say they were great :-) really fun, no rain during all event (last year it rained a lot in some days), I could visit Paraguay at last, I gave my DBUs mini-course lecture, it was like a private lesson as only one person appeared :-). Unfortunately I could not solve Camila's netbook wifi card problem. In the end I recompiled the kernel, which took more about 10 hours (!) in her netbook and the driver complained it does not recognise the wifi card. The problem is just that: there is no (100%) opensource driver for that wifi card, there are some binary drivers (3dsp.ko) but not for Arch Linux kernel, so I tried to recompile this old driver I found in the manufacturer web site. After a couple of changes I had to do in the driver's source code it compiled but not worked. Even ndiswrapper crashes when loading the Windows driver, so no go for now. The last options are changing from Arch Linux to one of the "supported" distributions or buy another card.

Latinoware: first day

2010-11-10T23:56:00.003-02:00

This is my second apperance in Latinoware and the first as a lecturer. Last year I spent most of the time at the KDE both, today I also spent a lot of time at the booth talking to visitors and fixing some problems in Camila's netbook (date/time configuration and wifi driver not working), but tomorrow I am going to visity Paraguay. For those who do not knows Paraguay is one of the three countries in this region, Argentina and Brazil are the other two, the countries are splitted only by two rivers. Ciudad del Leste in Paraguay is famous among Brazilians for its electronic shops :-)

Ok, let's stop talking about Paraguay. This first day we had all KDE lectures, tomorrow we are going to have Sandro's mini-course (Desktop and Mobile Developing with Qt 4.7) and in the (almost) last event of the last day my mini-course about programming with DBus (next Friday).

As usual we have all three event's offical languages

I took most of today's photos using Camila's camera, so I do not have the event's photos with me right now.

After some delay the event started with Tomaz Canabrava's lecture, "Programming with Efficiency: Two Games in 40 minutes". In the afternoon we had Adriano's ("Developing Rich Interface Qt Applications for Mobile") and Camila's lectures ("KDE Needs You: Paths to Start Contributing"). Ronny Yabar from Peru could not present his lecture "3D Developing with Qt and KDE" as far as I know because he became sick and was not able to take his flight to come here. Jos Poortvliet is going to present his lecture ("Why are you at Latinoware") tomorrow.

As the last event for this first day we had a confraternization with live music played by a local band.

More news tomorrow :-)

Back from Natal

2010-11-08T12:41:00.007-02:00

I am back from the IV Northeast Free Software Meeting (ENSL in Portuguese), which took place in Natal city. Photos, photos :-) Tomorrow I fly to Foz do Iguaçu to attend Latinoware. ENSL is the second edition of the III KDE Brazil Forum, the first one was in FISL, the next one is going to be during Latinoware, where KDE Brazil members will present lectures and mini-courses about Qt/KDE community and technologies.

First day, each of us gave our depoiments on how we first heard of KDE and why we like KDE community and software :-)

During the event we had the idea of making a KDE quiz to know who really learned something from our lectures. Who answered the question correctly won a KDE kit (t-shirt and two stickers). There were also some really funny answers hehe.

Many people in the event have heard of KDE before but did not know exactly what KDE really is, so the quiz was a great idea to receive feedback from the audience about our lectures and to have some fun :-)

Traveling in November

2010-11-03T00:42:00.000-02:00

The IV (Brazilian) Northeast Free Software Meeting (ENSL in Portuguese) is going to start next Friday and I am going to Natal city to attend it :-) That is going to be my first visit to Natal, which is +/- close to Recife, where I spent eight days early this year. I like northeast beaches because of the warm sea water. You just really need to use sun protector in the North, the sun there is noticeable stronger than here in the middle of Brazil.

After ENSL I am going to to Belo Horizonte and two days later I going to Foz do Iguaçu for Latinoware, the second biggest Brazilian free software conference, in the triple border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. In both conferences I am going to present a DBus programming mini-curse. Actually I am in a hurry these days to finish the last presentation details. We are going to have the III KDE Brazil Forum inside both ENSL and Latinoware, so if somebody is visiting (or live near) Natal or Foz do Iguaçu go there to see us.

Plasma NM: Mobile Connection Wizard commited

2010-10-06T14:50:00.004-03:00

Last night I commited the Mobile Connection Wizard patch, now Plasma NM can configure 3G connections (GSM and CDMA) easily. You can test the changes by checking out trunk Plasma NM (revision r1182930 at least) or waiting until distributions create unstable packages with the changes. In Gentoo you can try it out using knetworkmanager-9999 ebuild in kde overlay:

layman -a kde # or -s kde if you already added it

# edit /etc/make.conf to add layman's configuration

echo "kde-misc/knetworkmanager **" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

emerge -v =knetworkmanager-9999

With other distributions you need to checkout trunk Plasma NM or wait for the compiled package to appears in the repositories for unstable packages:

svn checkout svn+ssh://svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/base/networkmanagement

I tried to fix as most bugs as possible during Solid Sprint, there are still some minor things I want to change in the code, but I think it is ready for production. So have fun with it. Bugs can be reported through bugs.kde.org. I tested the code using KDE SC 4.5.1 and is very likely that it also works with 4.4.x. The only dependency I added is Qt-xml for parsing the mobile-broadband-provider-info file. The screenshots are the same as in the last post I wrote about it.

Solid Sprint: On the way home

2010-10-04T06:13:00.002-03:00

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.

And the thrilling continous...

2010-09-30T22:23:00.008-03:00

Well, I tried to post a paragraph yesterday but Opera Mobile in my Samsung i8910 posted only the title. I was using Opera mobile because I was inside the plane that brought me to Madrid waiting for it be fixed. There was a problem in the plane's air-conditioner and it took almost two hours to be detected and fixed. The plane was already going to the runway when the problem was detected. After the strike in Madrid, which really lasted one day, I thought what else could happen to me during this trip to Europe :-) Fortunately everything is going quite well and I hope Solid Sprint bings new bug fixes and features to KDE. Metal workers are doing their best here, the results are showing up as I write this...

Solid Sprint starts tomorrow

2010-09-30T19:24:00.000-03:00

Here I am at São Paulo international airport waiting for my flight to Madrid, which is going to take off in two and a half hours :-/ I am travelling alone and there isn't much things to do here. I arrived here three hours ago and finished to do everything I needed to, including my notebook at Receita Federal (or a risked it being confiscated when I return to Brazil next week). I have found a good spot here at the last floor, near a power outlet and the terrace. I can see most of the airport from here. There are few people here, which is good, now I can type my password on the sites I access without anybody looking at me :-) I am arriving in Madrid tomorrow around 12:15 (local time), so I already missed Sebas presentation in Madrid tonight :-/ Well, the Solid Sprint starts tomorrow and I will be there :-)

E-sata and Solid

2010-09-21T18:19:00.001-03:00

Some days ago a guy asked in the kde-hardware-devel mailing list how to make disks connected to an e-sata port to behave like removable disk in KDE. I have a notebook (Sager np7652) with one e-sata port and had this problem too, but have never tried to fix that, until now. I think what I have found can help other people too so I am writing this post.

After some tries I found a way to tell hald that my disks' partitions come from a removable disk. That works but have an inconvinience, I needed to create one configuration file per partition. Some more tries and finally I got to configure hald to treat all disks connected to my e-sata controller as removable:

Add this file to your system:

File /etc/hal/fdi/policy/40-e-sata.fdi

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="linux.sysfs_path" contains="/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/">
      <merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">false</merge>
      <merge key="@block.storage_device:storage.removable" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Change the contains part to match your e-sata controller's. You can find it using the command:

Code

evolucao ~ # find /sys/devices/ -name sdb
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host4/target4:0:0/4:0:0:0/block/sdb

Restart hald: /etc/init.d/hald restart
That's it :-)

The strange thing is that the file /sys/class/block/sdb/removable contains 0, it should contains 1 since the disk is removable. Maybe it is a kernel bug.

Hal is deprecated for some years now, KDE SC, more precisely Solid, is the only desktop/library that uses it extensively. When we, Solid metal-workers, finish Solid transition to udisk and upower probably hal is gonna vanish for ever.

In less than two weeks there will a Solid Sprint in Madri (Spain), I will be there :-), and we are going to discuss how far we are from the end of this transition. Honestly I like hal, it is flexible from users point of view. I have never used udisk and I do not know if it possible to workaround a problem in the kernel such as this one about disks connected to a e-sata controller using udisk. I hope it is.

Plasma NM: Mobile Connection Wizard

2010-09-12T19:50:00.001-03:00

Hi all, two months ago I said I was working on the porting of the nm-applet's connection wizard to Plasma Network Manager. The first part is almost done:

Vendor and model name only appear if Plasma NM has been compiled with ModemManager support and if ModemManager has already enabled the device. If neither of those conditions has been satisfied then "Installed GSM device" it will appear instead. By default ModemManager allows only root to enable devices, so I cannot enable them in the wizard. Solid also does not return my modem's vendor and model names. Maybe Network Manager can help me here.

I had to recreate the code from scratch because last month I deleted all what I had done by accident :-/

I still need to fix some bugs in the wizard and make the code cleaner. I also have thought in prettifying the wizard but QWizard does not have many options to do that. For instance, I would like to use images instead of the < and > characters, but I as far as I know there is no way to do that. nm-applet's wizard also uses a blue background in the page's title ("Choose your Provider" in this screenshot) and a frame around the widgets, it looks good in my opinion. So far I have not found how to do that neither.

I am using QDomDocument to parse /usr/share/mobile-broadband-provider-info/serviceproviders.xml, it really simplifies the code. Talking about code, nm-applet's wizard is a difficult to read code, lots of macros and options to functions, several things done "by hand", which in Qt is a simple method call.

The next step is salving the options, but I will reorganize the code first, maybe next weekend. I still need to add the code to get data for CDMA connections and some more code to hide/show the widgets that should not appear in such case (CDMA connections does not use APN for instance). There are a lot of small things to do yet, so "keep walking" :-)

Symbian Modding

2010-09-09T14:35:00.005-03:00

This week I changed my i8910's firmware from HX to n2o4. n2o4 has very fast kastor effects so I like it at first, but I do not like some other things: the theme is too "yellow" to my taste and I like the icon's white border in the original Nero II theme, which I use with HX. The problem is that I also like to listen to radio but Nero II (and all other Morkino's theme I have used so far) has a problem that radio frequency does not appear. Yesterday I tried to solve this problem and finally I got success :-). What I did is:

Install siscontents160b
Open Nero_II_HD_.sis
Click on the icon "Contents"
Select the file "themepackage.skn" in the contents
Click on View details
Then on "Colours" tab
Then on "Add colour groups" and select "Samsung Text Colours". You can keep the default colours or change it for your taste
Click on "Close"
Click on "File" menu entry, then "Save as..."
Install the fixed theme :-)

I have also changed the homescreen toolbar icons to fit Nero II using these steps. This is the result:

Pra quem estiver interessado fiz upload do arquivo "Message 1.aac" que uso como tom para chegada de mensagens.

Bug Corrections

2010-09-04T21:31:00.000-03:00

This week I decided to search for some bugs to solve in bugs.kde.org. I searched for bugs related to Plasma NM, Kopete and Bluedevil, three programs that I use a lot. One day I will stop by to try to solve some bugs in Amarok (specially 188360 and 234833). I am not familiar with Amarok's source code, some months ago I even tried to solve one bug there but it did not work out.

In Plasma NM I tried to solve these bugs:

214297: multiple interfaces of same type not distinguishable in UI (commited)
249702: Network Manager Applet crash after reconnect to 3G (not solved yet, waiting for reporter's feedback)
233469: knetworkmanager confused by /etc/init.d/network restart (I have been trying to solve this one for months but still no go)

In Kopete I tried this one:

222689: Tool tip systray of kopete icon missing (patch ready, if nobody asks to change something else I am going to commit it tomorrow)

In Bluedevil I fixed this crash:

246638: kded crashes in latest trunk (I do not have write access to Bluedevil's git repository, so I am waiting for the developers to commit my patch)

I also asked the sysadmin team to solve two bugs I found in reviewboard site: Bug 250050 - Wrong email for the kde-networkmanager mailing list and problem uploading images. The bugs were solved in few hours, I like when things are solved quickly :-)

I am monitoring some other bugs, but I have not had the time to investigate them. Three bugs solved this week, that is ok for me :-D

"Beautiful Horizon"

2010-08-19T19:51:00.003-03:00

That is the English name of Belo Horizonte, the city where my fellows from KDE-MG group and I celebrated the 4.5 releases of KDE software. At the release party for 4.4 we tried to bring a cake, but it did not work out. This time Tulio, KDE-MG's member, made a surprise for us and brought some fashion, and taste, honey breads:

It was a pleasure night in Belo Horizonte, "Frango Frito" was crowed of people, I have never seen it that crowed before. Not all members of KDE-MG could attend the release party this time, well, they lost the honey breads hehe:

The release party was also a meeting to finish the details for the 3th Free Software Festival Belo Horizonte (FSLBH), which happened last Saturday in Betim, a city close to Belo Horizonte. This year we had help from the Betim Opensource guys to organise the FSLBH/Betim and to talk to the Pitagoras university to hold the event and hand over the computer classrooms for the mini-courses. Many thanks to them.

During the event we had lectures about free software and some mini-courses, including mine of Qt programming. I used the material created by Sandro and Tomaz from Liveblue, thanks to them.

We also distributed some gifts during the event:

The event last one day and it was for free. This time we asked the participants to bring toys to be distributed to a charity institution in Belo Horizonte:

FSLBH is becoming a recurrent event in Belo Horizonte, one the biggest cities in Brazil with several information technology universities. The KDE community is also increasing :-)

More pictures of the FSLBH, release parties and other events are available at the KDE-BR's flicker homepage.

Hotkey buttons and udev

2010-08-18T21:33:00.006-03:00

As many notebooks out there mine has some hotkey buttons for (de)activate the wifi card, bluetooth controller, webcam, etc. With the buttons sometimes the notebook also has leds to indicate which hardware is activated at the moment, unfortunately my notebook only has leds for wifi and bluetooth, not for the webcam. More unfortunately yet the leds for wifi and bluetooth is the same led but with different color to indicate when only one of them are activated, but I must say Clevo, the manufacturer of my notebooks' barebone, did not make a good choice selecting the colors orange and green :-( It is very difficult to distinguish between the states wifi on / bluetooth off and wifi off / bluetooth on. Even the state wifi on / bluetooth on is not easy to notice. To minimize that problem I created some udev rules and some scripts to open a KDE notification dialog every time they are activated or deactivated. Everybody in Linux "world" must have heard of udev, the system daemon which receives events from the kernel and run programs or scripts based on rules storared in /etc/udev/rules.d or /lib/udev/rules.d. In my case I added my rules to /etc/udev/rules.d:

File /etc/udev/rules.d/50-lvs-rfkill.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="rfkill", RUN+="lvs-rfkill.sh"

File /etc/udev/rules.d/50-lvs-webcam.rules

# Change the idProduct and idVendor attributes to your camera's.
# Use lsusb to find them.
SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0343", ATTRS{idVendor}=="5986", RUN+="lvs-webcam.sh"

Then run this to reload the rules:

Reload udev rules

udevadm control --reload-rules

Now we need to create the scripts lvs-rfkill.sh and lvs-webcam.sh and give execution permission to them (chmod 755):

File /lib/udev/lvs-rfkill.sh

#!/bin/sh

find_display()
{
    if [ -r "/proc/$1/environ" ]
    then
        perl -ne 'if ( /DISPLAY=([^:]+){0,1}(:\d+)(.\d+){0,1}/ )
         { print "$1$2$3\n"; }' &lt; /proc/$1/environ
    fi

    return 0
}

user_loop()
{
    OLD_DISPLAY=$DISPLAY
    ps -C kwrapper -C kwrapper4 h -o pid,user | while read pid user
    do
        grep -q ksmserver /proc/$pid/cmdline &> /dev/null || continue
        export DISPLAY=$(find_display $pid)
        su - $user -c "$1"
    done
    export DISPLAY=$OLD_DISPLAY
    unset OLD_DISPLAY
    sleep 1
}

title=
msg=
case $RFKILL_TYPE in
    wlan)
        title="Wireless"

        case $ACTION in
            add|change)
                case $RFKILL_STATE in
                    0)
                        msg="Wireless disabled"
                    ;;
                        
                    1)
                        msg="Wireless enabled"
                    ;;

                    2)
                        msg="Wireless disabled by hardware"
                    ;;
                esac
            ;;

            remove)
                msg="Wireless disabled"
            ;;
        esac
    ;;

    bluetooth)
        title="Bluetooth"

        case $ACTION in
            add)
                msg="Bluetooth enabled"
                echo 1 > /sys/$DEVPATH/state
            ;;

            remove)
                msg="Bluetooth disabled"
            ;;
        esac
    ;;
esac

if [ "$msg" != "" ]
then
    user_loop "$(ls /usr/kde/*/bin/kdialog | tail -n 1) \
        --title \"$title\" --passivepopup \"$msg\" 3"
fi

File /lib/udev/lvs-webcam.sh

#!/bin/sh

find_display()
{
    if [ -r "/proc/$1/environ" ]
    then
        perl -ne 'if ( /DISPLAY=([^:]+){0,1}(:\d+)(.\d+){0,1}/ )
            { print "$1$2$3\n"; }' &lt; /proc/$1/environ
    fi

    return 0
}

user_loop()
{
    OLD_DISPLAY=$DISPLAY
    ps -C kwrapper -C kwrapper4 h -o pid,user | while read pid user
    do
        grep -q ksmserver /proc/$pid/cmdline &> /dev/null || continue
        export DISPLAY=$(find_display $pid)
        su - $user -c "$1"
    done
    export DISPLAY=$OLD_DISPLAY
    unset OLD_DISPLAY
    sleep 1
}

title="Webcam"
msg="Webcam"

case $ACTION in
    add)
        msg="$msg enabled"
    ;;

    remove)
        msg="$msg disabled"
    ;;
esac

user_loop "$(ls /usr/kde/*/bin/kdialog | tail -n 1) \
    --title \"$title\" --passivepopup \"$msg\" 3"

Now every time you turn wifi/bluetooth/webcam on/off a notification will appear near KDE's notification tray icon:

Samsung i8910: Interesting programs

2010-08-04T23:30:00.021-03:00

Web

hhttp://m.gmail.com
http://m.voosmobile.com.br: shows Brazilian flight details on all Brazilian airports.
http://mkut.jmobi.com.br (orkut): it is fast, but does not show images. Another alternative, which shows images, is accessing http://www.sandbox.orkut.com and click on the bottom-right link "Visualizar o site inteiro", but be warned that it is a little slow if you do not have fast Internet connection.
http://mfut.jmobi.com.br (brazilian soccer championships results)
http://www.bmfbovespa.com.br/MOVEL (main brazilian stock market)

Symbian binaries

UC PLayer 2.2.2.10: finally a rmvb (and other formats) player that works.
I8910_R66.SISX: AKA Route66, GPS program that comes with i8910. It works good although many people seems to like Garmin and OviMaps better.
maps_installer_3.04_10wk11_b01_s60_5.0.Nocs.sis: maps takes less space than Route66 (190 MB vs 460 MB) and are easier to watch when zooming in and out.
TTPod s60v5 v3.71 (includes Portuguese version): good MP3 player, playlist support, sorting, lyrics and picture fetching, equalizer, skin support among other things.
Jbak.Taskman.v1.37: excelent task manager. This version is touch screen ready.
DataQuota.1.23.sisx
PNTools_S60v5_S603rd.sis: traceroute and ping utility.
PktPing.sis: ping utility.
uTalk: very good IM (Jabber, Gtalk, MSN, ICQ, Facebook, etc). Supports connecting to Jabber and GTalk at the same time. Unfortunately supports text message only, no VoIP or video conversation. It is supposed to support sending image and voice (as mp3 file), but it seems to do not work with non-utalk contacts, which comprises all my contacts. The location (GPS) feature also seems to work only with utalk contacts. I had to edit the 1.2.0 version .sis file using siscontents and remove the three files in !:/private/20025174/ directory to make the .sis file install. I copied the files to that directory after the installation.
fring94.sis: IM and VoIP client. I prefer to use the Nokia N97 version because it supports loudspeaker function, which the i8910 version does not. N97's fring does not let me input my fring id and password when using DayHand keyboard, so I had to disable DayHand (set AknFEP in the first option when opening DayHand app), enter the id and password and then reenable DayHand (set the other option in the first option when opening DayHand app).
talkonaut-s60.sisx (cliente jabber, GTalk, MSN, ICQ, Voip e SIP). Unfortunately it does not connect to Gtalk and Jabber at the same time, but uTalk does :-)
PhoNetInfo_v2.5.0.sis: shows complete phone information.
Nokia Connectivity Analyzer: handy program with lots of information about your Internet connection.
Mobile Info v0.2.0.sis: shows phone information.
Lock Screen 0.11.78.sisx: nice lock screen replacement. I needed to enable the keylock patch in ROMPatcher+ to make it to work properly.
DayHand_Input_by_Mr._Milk_19r4_unsigned.sis: nice virtual keyboard replacement. To make the % character available: copy the file C:/Data/dayhandinput/config/sym.ini to your computer, add the % symbol to the second line and copy the file back.
Mathiola Stopwatch: interesting stopwatch, supports laps and the time difference between the laps. OBS: Requires Qt libraries to run.
mConnection(005).sis: very simple (yet usefull) traffic monitor. When accessing the Internet it wil show two numbers at the screen's center top corner. The first is the amount of data transfered, the second is the current speed.
SisEditor.sisx: it is like a siscontents for Symbian, edits .sis files. Usually nobody needs to edit a .sis, I, for one, had to edit them in two ocasions only: to change the icons and colors in a S60v5 theme and to remove some files that prevent one program to install (I copied the files manually after instalation).
FinanzS60.sis: another finance (and scientifc) calculator. This is the one I use now.

Shareware or Commercial Programs
LCG.X-plore.v1.42.sisx: powerfull file manager.
Symsmb.v4.zip: implements SMB protocol in Symbian, in other words you can navigate on a Windows network (or Linux with Samba) and access directories or export a directory from i8910 to the network.
Smartphoneware.Best.Birthday.v2.0.S60v3.S60v5.SymbianOS9.x.Unsigned.sis: scans contact list and shows the anniversary for each contact. It can also add a reminder in the calender apps so a alarm will sound at the anniversary date. It also show the zodiac sign for each contact and can sort contacts by remain days to the anniversary.
MobiFunSoft.SmartSettings.v3.03: let change the first icon on Finger Use theme to a sub-menu with as many shorcuts as we want, very handy in my oppinion. There is other features too.
PhoneTorch 2.0.2: flash light (uses camera LED)
FinanzS60.sis: very good finance and scientific calculator.

Games
meteorbeta_nokia5800_01.sis: this one is fun, but takes a lot of battery joice.
solitaire_s60_5_0_v_1_1_0_selfs.sis: Solitaire :-)
Offscreen Freecell.sis: Freecell :-)
Offscreen_Checkers_touch.sis: Checkers :-)
touchpiano_s60_5_0_v_1_0_0_signed.sis: to play piano with i8910. Well, it has only octave and there are a lot of lag between pressing the key and the actual sound, so it is not that fun :-/
mirror.sis: activate the front camera.

Flash
QuickInfo.wgz: shows several information about the phone.
FlashLight v7 FINAL By Azzam Mouawad.rar: flash light (does not use LED camera)
appuidlist.wgz: shows Symbian app uids, QuickInfo also list apps uids and Jbak Taskman show app uid for a given process.

Java
SoftTouchStopWatch.zip: very good stop watch, supports laps.
Unite.Bank.Finance.Calc.v1.00.S60.Java.rar: finance calculator
ScratchPad.zip: blackboard
anyRemote-48b.jar: client program to control a Linux computer from i8910 using bluetooth

Python
s60_as_bt_gps.py: program to transform i8910 into a bluetooth GPS. You can import GPS data in real-time into GoogleEarth too.
Birthdays-for-S60: program similar to Best Birthdays, it is free software, although this one lacks many Best Birthdays features.

Plasma NM, modem Sony MD300 and more...

2010-07-31T16:58:00.005-03:00

During the time I implemented ModemManager support in Solid I did the tests with my Sony MD300 modem. For anyone to use this modem in Linux do this as root (or use sudo):

Install networkmanager-0.8 and modemmanager-0.4;

Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/50-md300modem.rules with the follwing contents:

1. ACTION!="add", GOTO="3G_End"
2. SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", ATTRS{idProduct}=="d0cf", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0fce", PROGRAM+="md300modem.sh %p"
3. SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="d0cf", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0fce", KERNEL=="ttyACM*", SYMLINK+="modem3G-%n"
4. LABEL="3G_End"

Create the script /lib/udev/md300modem.sh with the following contents:

1. #!/bin/sh
2. echo 3 > /sys/$1/device/bConfigurationValue
3. sleep 3
4. # enables/activates the modem (turns radio on and registers to operator network).
5. chat -V -s '' "AT +CFUN=1" 'OK' '' < /dev/ttyACM0 > /dev/ttyACM0

Run: udevadm control --reload-rules;
Click on Plasma NM's system tray icon -> Manage Connections -> Mobile broadband -> Add -> GSM Connection and use the parameters:
```
Number: *99#
Username: <operator's username>
Senha: <operator's password>
APN: <operator's apn>
Type: Any
```
```
For instance my configuration is as follow:
```
```
Number: *99#
Nome do usuário: tim
Senha: tim
APN: tim.br
Type: Any
```
OBS: some cell phones, like my Samsung i8910, only connects if "Type" is set to "Any". The MD300 connects with any of the types listed.
Hook up the modem to the USB port, wait until it powers up and register itself to the operator network (takes about 30 seconds to do both);
In the Plasma NM initial window clicks on the connection you have created.

My modem connects only once in ethernet mode (default mode), to connect again I have to remove it from USB port and hook it up again. I do not know why that happens and one guy told me his MD300 does not behave like that. Oddly enough with wvdial and kppp, which uses ppp mode, it does have this problem.

To make it easier to set up a Mobile Broadband connection I have started to port the nm-applet connection wizard to KDE. It is still in early stage and I am working on it only during weekends. Probably it will be ready for KDE release 4.6 early next year. The initial window is like this:

It takes some time to understand how both nm-applet wizard and Plasma NM kcm modue work and since I can only work on it during weekends do not expected something usefull until September.

Plasma NM: testing mode

2010-07-14T18:31:00.000-03:00

I am back to Brasil after a great time in Tampere and Helsinki. During Akademy I commited my changes to Solid and Plasma NetworkManagement to trunk, now anyone brave anough to use trunk can try them :-)

Today I have added a hack to Plasma NM to make the traffic graph work with ppp connections. The problem was that NetworkManager only provides the serial device name (e.g. /dev/ttyACM0 or /dev/ttyUSB0) and Plasma::DataEngine expects the network interface name (ppp0) used by the device. I hacked Plasma NM by changing the Plasma::DataEngine::connectSource parameter to always use ppp0 when the interface name contains ttyACM or ttyUSB. I know that is ugly and error prone, if anyone knows how to convert serial device names to network interface names let me know. The only way to do it I have found so far is monitoring /var/log/daemon (or /var/log/messages) for the line pppd[]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyACM0, but that is also ugly and the log file containing the needed information can be different on each platform KDE SC is installed.

I have also tested Plasma NM with my Samsung i8910 cell phone. It only connects if I set Plasma NM's tray icon -> Manage Connections -> Mobile Broadband -> -> Edit -> Type to "Any" (it was "Prefer3G" before the change). Maybe someone else also needs to change that to make his/her phone connect. The number to dial also needs to be *99# instead of *99***1# . That is strange because my Sony MD300 modem works with *99***1# and as far as I know *99# is a short name for *99***1#.

Modem Manager does not report the access technology (Edge, HSDPA, etc) for my cell phone. I have received the report that Nokia N95 also connects and MM also does not report the access technology for that phone too.

There are other changes I am working on, when they are ready I will let you know :-)

Sager NP7652: finally

2010-06-23T20:07:00.114-03:00

Yesterday, I finally got my Sager NP7652 laptop (Clevo W765CUH barebone) in my hands. The LCD was replaced and there is no dead pixels (so far). I copied my Gentoo installation from my old Acer Ferrari 4005 to it to avoid the loooooong process of installing Gentoo from the begining, also because my Internet connection is slow and it would take almost a week to download the source code for all ebuilds. The configuration (click on the image to see it completely):

More info about this laptop on Xoticpc and Notebook Review.

This report is listed at
TuxMobil - Linux compatibility guides for laptops, notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones and GPS devices.

ACPI

Battery

/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state does not show the "present rate", which prevents KDE's powerdevil to measure how much remaining time I still have. I had this problem with my Acer Ferrari 4005 too, a BIOS update solved the problem that time. Unfortunately Sager has discontinued this laptop, which was released less than six months ago, those notebook sellers must be kidding to discontinue a notebook so fast. So until I find a BIOS update to solve this problem I am using the kernel's CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT feature to replace the BIOS's DSDT by one I have edited by hand. To use the new DSDT:

Download it
Enable CONFIG_ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT: make menu_config -> Power management and ACPI options -> ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) Support -> Custom DSDT Table file to include. Select the downloaded file.
Compile and install the new kernel.
Reboot, that is it.

Here is the diff of the original DSDT.

Fans

The fans run at full speed since kernel boots up, but if you press the third hot key button (the one with a M surrounded by an elipse) the fans run quietly, this is called "silent mode". If you press it again the fans run at full speed again. OBS: the processor will *not* run at full power when in silent mode. OBS2: when using ATI proprietary drivers (ati-drivers ebuild) instead of the opensource drivers (xf86-video-ati ebuild) the fans run quietly.

Speedstep

Driver: acpi-cpufreq.ko.

I tried to use phc-intel to undervolt the CPU C-states but it did not work as expected. It seems this Core i7 620m CPU recognise the undervolt and automatically reduces CPU performance instead of allowing it to crash. Do not worry, the crash is part of the tweaking process to get the voltage values to configure the phc-intel module. I tried all values from 20 mW to 1 mV at 2667 MHz clock and the CPU did not crash but the performance decreased when compiling the kernel. Since this CPU has turbo mode capability I guess it is it that is automatically decreasing CPU performance to avoid the crash. The clock stayed at 2667 MHz, but compiling the kernel was much more slower using 1 mV than with 20 mW.

Suspend to Disk

I am using TuxOnIce for suspend to disk. To install it:

Apply the patch against the kernel.
Enable it make menu_config -> Power management and ACPI options ->Enhanced Hibernation (TuxOnIce) -> File Allocator, Swap Allocator (if you have a swap partition), Userspace User Interface support and install the new kernel.
Install pm-utils ebuild/package: emerge -v pm-utils
Edit /etc/pm/config.d/gentoo and change the line with SLEEP_MODULE to SLEEP_MODULE="tuxonice". Now KDE's powerdevil plasmoid will use TuxOnIce to hibernate.

Bluetooth

Cambridge Silicon Radio bluetooth controller, driver: btusb.ko.

Card Reader

JMicron SD/MS Host controllers, Secure Digital driver: sdhci-pci.ko, Memory Stick driver: jmb38x_ms.ko. Tested with SD and MS PRO Duo cards. Not tested but should work as well: MS, MS PRO, MS Duo, Mini-SD, MMC and RS cards.

DVD Burning

Works as expected, at least when burning an iso image to a DVD-r media (8x speed).

Finger Print Reader

Working in progress: How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader

Hot Key Buttons

All buttons working:

E-mail.
Internet (Web Browser).
Toggle Silient Mode (for power saving). When enabled, Silent Mode will reduce fan noise and save power consumption. Note this may reduce computer performance.

I have configured udev to make show a KDE notification when the wifi, bluetooth or webcam is activated / desactivated. You can do the same for the silent hot key button using khotkey section in KDE's systemsettings, no need to go for udev.

Modem

Does not work yet: Re: AW: agere softmodem HDA + Intel Ibex Peak High Definition Audio

Sata and e-Sata

Intel Ibex Peak 4 port SATA AHCI controller, driver ahci.ko. To compile the driver: make menu config -> Device Drivers -> Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers -> AHCI SATA support

This is what I do before switching my e-Sata HD off:

umount all partitions.
echo 1 > /sys/block/sdb/device/delete

When issuing the last command the following lines appears in dmesg:

[40049.014691] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Synchronizing SCSI cache
[40049.014851] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Stopping disk
[40049.341191] ata5.00: disabled

You configure hald and udisks to thread "e-sata" disks as removable. Udisks is the default disk manager in KDE SC 4.6.x, so it is preferable.

Sound Card

Intel Ibex Peak HDA sound card, driver: snd-hda-intel.ko. Playback and internal microphone tested with Skype, all working. I moved my old /etc/asound.conf to /etc/asound.ferrari, it is not needed anymore because this sound card multiplex audio streamings without dmix alsa plugin. I do not have any s/pdif receiver so I cannot test it.

Just a side note: when the power save mode is enabled (echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save) every time you change the volumes with a mixer or some program starts to play something there is a short crack sound in the speakers. It sounds even when all volume channels are mute or using earphone. That is annoying, so I prefer to disable the power save mode (echo 0 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save).

USB

Intel Ibex Peak EHCI controller, drivers: ehci-hcd.ko and uhci-hcd.ko.

Video

ATI HD4570 video card, driver: xf86-video-ati-6.13.0, firmware: radeon-ucode-20100408. Working with KMS+DRI2, Googleearth and Kwin's composite effects work together too!!!. To use the firmware enable make menuconfig -> Device Drivers -> Generic Driver Options -> Include in-kernel firmware blobs in kernel binary. Then type "radeon/R700_rlc.bin" in "External firmware blobs to build into the kernel binary", copy /lib/firmware/radeon/R700_rlc.bin to /usr/src/linux/firmware/radeon/ and compile the kernel.

Relevant ebuilds (packages) I am using:

kernel 2.6.33.4
xf86-video-ati-6.13.0
radeon-ucode-20100408
xorg-server-1.8.1-r1
mesa-7.8.2
libdrm-2.4.19

Proprietary Driver (fglrx.ko)

Using ati-drivers ebuild brings one big advantage: the GPU runs cooler and the fans run quieter (as quiet as in Windows 7). I think it also helps with battery time, but I have not measure it. That only works as long as Xorg is running, if you to go the console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) the GPU fans start to run at full speed. Going back to Xorg makes them run quiter again. The 3D performance is noticeably better with ati-drivers.

One disadvantage in using ati-drivers is that you have to disable KMS (kernel modsetting) and the radeon kernel module. Otherwise the LCD gets blank when Xorg starts and you will have to restart the notebook to restore the video card to the correct state. Using composite (3D effects) while playing movies usually makes the movie flicker. To solve that problem DRI2 and KMS were created but since we cannot use KMS with ati-drivers I thought I would have to disable the 3D effects when using mplayer. Fortunately there is no flicker :-). In my old notebook (Ferrari 4005, ATI x700 card) the flickering is very annoying. I still own the Ferrari 4005, anyone here wants to buy a Ferrari notebook? :-) The battery still holds 72% of the original manufacturer capacity (around 3400 mAh) and everything works in Linux, accept the svideo port and the card reader, which does not read SD cards anymore, but reads Memory Stick (weird, hugh?) It comes with a bluetooth mouse too.

Unfortunately several important aticonfig commands do not work with this card:

evolucao ~ # aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-getclocks --od-gettemperature
Adapter 0 - ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series
                            Core (MHz)    Memory (MHz)
           Current Clocks :    680           500
             Current Peak :    680           500
  Configurable Peak Range : [680-680]     [500-500]
                 GPU load :    0%
ERROR - Get temperature failed for Adapter 0 - ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series

GPU load always stays at 0% and the thermal sensors are not compatible with aticonfig. Everest in Windows 7 is able to get the GPU temperature. As you can also notice the GPU and Memory clocks cannot be changed.

VGA Port

Works as expected. KDE has this beautiful and effecient kcm module to configure multiple monitors and it works great with the ATI HD4570:

HDMI Port

It works but I was only able to use my brother's TV as copy of my notebook's screen. I could not not use it as extension of my desktop (screens side by side). I was able to rotate the screen without problems. I did not test the audio capability of the HDMI connection yet.

Webcam

BisonCam NB Pro webcam, driver: uvcvideo.ko. To compile the driver: make menu config -> Device Drivers -> Multimedia support -> Video capture adapters -> V4L USB devices -> USB Video Class (UVC)

Wired Ethernet

JMicron JMC250 gigabit ethernet PCI-e, driver jme.ko. To compile the driver: make menu config -> Device Drivers -> Network device support -> Ethernet (1000 Mbit) -> JMicron(R) PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet support

Wireless

Intel WiFi Link 6000, driver: iwlagn.ko, firmware: iwl6000-ucode-9.193.4.1.

Gentoo Specific

In /etc/make.conf:

CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=core2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -msse3 -msse4 -mcx16 -mpopcnt -msahf"
LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS} -Wl,-O1"
VIDEO_CARDS="vesa radeon"
ALSA_CARDS="snd-hda-intel usb-audio"

Symbolic link: /etc/make.profile -> ../usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop/kde . It is ironic the fact that Gentoo use amd64 profile for an Intel processor.

File /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

microcode # for updating CPU's microcode
acpi-cpufreq # for CPU frequency scaling
cdc-acm # for my 3G modem
fglrx # for the video card
vboxdrv # for VirtualBox
vboxnetflt # idem
vboxnetadp # idem

All other drivers are automaticaly loaded by udev during boot initialization. Except for fglrx.ko and the three VirtualBox drivers (vboxdrv.ko, vboxnetflt.ko, vboxnetadp.ko) all other drivers are included in the vanilla Linux kernel. fglrx.ko is compiled by the x11-drivers/ati-drivers ebuild and the three VirtualBox drivers are compiled by the app-emulation/virtualbox-modules ebuild

Things yet to Test

Express card slot
Multi-gesture touchpad

lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Arrandale DRAM Controller (rev 12)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Arrandale PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 12)

00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak HECI Controller (rev 06)

00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak High Definition Audio (rev 06)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 06)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 06)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 06)

00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 06)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a6)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak LPC Interface Controller (rev 06)

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 06)

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Ibex Peak SMBus Controller (rev 06)

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series]

02:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc R700 Audio Device [Radeon HD 4000 Series]

06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 6000 Series (rev 35)

07:00.0 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller (rev 80)

07:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller (rev 80)

07:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. MS Host Controller (rev 80)

07:00.5 Ethernet controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMC250 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet (rev 03)

ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02)

ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02)

ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation QPI Link 0 (rev 02)

ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation QPI Physical 0 (rev 02)

ff:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 2d12 (rev 02)

ff:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 2d13 (rev 02)

lsusb output:

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 5986:0343 Acer, Inc -> webcam

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 147e:1000 Upek -> fingerprint reader

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 03eb:0902 Atmel Corp. 4-Port Hub

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Full support to Modem Manager 0.4 in Solid

2010-06-13T15:07:00.003-03:00

I have finally finished to implement Modem Manager 0.4 specification in solid. I still need to add more comment in the source code and implement more caching to prevent stress in the DBus bus. Now I need help to test the implementation because my Sony MD300 modem supports less than 1/3 of the specification. Nothing from interfaces Location, Cdma, Gsm.Contacts, Gsm.SMS, Gsm.Hso and Gsm.Ussd work with my modem, but I have implemented them anyway. I am going to commit the patch after trunk is opened for new implementations, which AFAIK is after the first KDE SC 4.5.0 rc release next week.

For those who likes statistics, the patch adds 128 new files, changes other 23 files in trunk, is 400 KB in size and took me eight weeks to reach this stage.

Plasma Network Management and ModemManager

2010-06-07T23:39:00.000-03:00

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.

Solid ModemManager backend

2010-05-31T11:40:00.000-03:00

Hi there, after two days of hard working now we have a real ModemManager backend for solid. The first patches I created implement MM support too tied to GsmNetworkInterface class, which means you had to instantiate a NetworkManager class to use ModemManager, that is not necessary anymore. The bad news is that the translate team has a couple of .desktop files to translate besides the source code.

This night was long, I spent several hours trying to fix a difficult to trace bug. I inspected the program and it should work but somehow the kded module crashed when instantiating a ModemGsmNetworkInterface class, in fact it instantiated the class but when it tried to use one of its methods the program crashed. The problem was that ModemGsmNetworkInterface inherited from ModemInterface and declared a d_ptr pointer, which it should not, only ModemInterface class should declare d_ptr. That problem fixed I found an infinite loop in the program hehe, that was easy to fix. After that I had to fight with the signal and slots strings to make them match. If you see a lot of "No such slot" (or signal) messages in ~/.xsession-errors you know what I am talking about. This time I saw other messages too, like "incompatible signal and slot types" (because of full nested namespace names in some places but not in other) and "impossible to connect" (because the slot's object was null). After some try and error rounds I fixed that too and finally my Plasma NM is working again. Only one bug remains: when removing the modem from USB port the kded module crashes because the ModemGsmNetworkinterface object becomes invalid and the program does not detect that. I will fix that next weekend, now I need rest and I also have other work to do during the week. Keeping this pace I think I can finish the patch by the end of the month.

Plasma NM: more updates

2010-05-24T11:09:00.004-03:00

My first MM implementation to solid added the MM dbus interface to GsmNetworkInterface class, MM can run independently from NM, then it is more logical to implement solid MM as a separated backend, that is what I started to do last Saturday. Well, the work is much more complex than I have thought. I spent the whole Saturday reorganizing the code, creating new files, and eliminating some namespaces. The solid interface is ready (I think), now I need to reorganize the NM backend and make everything work again. If the first implementation was an old car I may say I am pimping my code hehe, I completely dismantled the code, now I am reassembling everything together with a nice look. Probably tomorrow I will try to finish the backend.

Last Friday I did some experiments with using html-like tables to implement interface details using a single Plasma::Label, that simplifies the code and, most important, reduces memory usage. I almost succeed, the result is this:

Another advantage of using html tables is that now we can select which detail to show per interface type. In the current implementation the entries Operator, Signal Quality and Access Technology are only shown for Gsm connections. Monolithic Knm uses a similar code to showing tooltips for the interfaces. One other thing Knm does is let the user select which detail and in which order to present them, that is more flexible than what I have implemented so far. I plan to port that code to Plasma NM in the future as more I progress in MM implementation the more information will be added to interface details, so it would be good to select which detail I want to see. One more thing to the TODO list.

Sometimes I get very stubborn to finish one thing. If you look at the screenshot above you can see the access technology and signal quality beside the connection name at the right side of Plasma NM. I thought I could do that in a couple of hours at most, what naive of me. Yesterday morning I started to dig the code finding how Plasma NM does that for wireless connections. Man, it looks like a labirint, only today morning I finally have got everything working, well almost everything, there are some edges to polish. What took me so much time was the fact the wireless component gets the signal strength througth org.kded.networkmanagement (a kded module), so I had to implemented one interface for org.kded.networkmanagement too, more precisely org.kded.networkmanagement.GsmInterfaceConnection. The implementation adds 13 new files to the source code :-/ and charnges several other files. Well, at least now I can see the signal quality and access technology without having to open the interface details window :-) Yes!!!

Solid, ModemManager and Plasma Applet

2010-05-20T00:12:00.001-03:00

I talked to Sebas yesterday and we finally got plasma applet running on my notebook. I have discontinued my patch for monolithic knm and today I have finished to port my changes to plasma applet, here is the result:

I removed the "Access Technology" combox from my old patch because I need to find a better place to add it. I have also fixed some bugs in plasma applet since yesterday:

in my notebook the window did not resize to accomodate the traffic graph when I clicked on interface details, now it does.
the mac address were only shown for wired and wireless connections, now it works for any kind of connections which have MAC address (ppp0 for instance does not have).
if someone selects "Show more" and plasma-desktop closes (crash or restart), next time plasma-desktop run (without logging out), it would show all wireless AP around, which is not the initial state for the widget on the right side. The initial state shows manually added or activated connections only. Now it works as expected if plasma-desktop restarts.

I plan to add separated tabs for each connection type (wired, wireless, gsm, etc), like monolithic knm does. In plasma applet there is only one details tab, which is filled with connection information as needed. If some information is not relevant (operator name for wired connection for instance) or is not available it will take space in the details window and cause plasma applet's window size to increase unnecessarily.

Another thing I want to implement is notifications. Monolithic knm already have notifications working, but it seems plasma applet does not implement them.

Solid and ModemManager (update)

2010-05-17T19:33:00.000-03:00

This weekend I added some more info in the Mobile Broadband tab in knm:

The * indicates the current configuration and the line below it shows the actual access technology used. As you can see my operator has no 3G network here where I live. Other two operators have 3G here, I used to use of them but since they limit my speed to 128 kbps after 1 GB of data I switched to my current operator, which also limits me after 1 GB, but in 200 kbps and the bill is about $14 cheaper. "Unlimited" plans are very common here in Brazil, so I can download everything I want at 200 kbps maximum for about $33.50 (expensive but I do not have better alternatives). Usually the speed is around 100 kbps, it only reaches 230-240 kbps (modem maximum in 2G mode) after midnight (vampiristic 2G I may say hehe). The other configurations are:

I have also updated the patches and documentation in both http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/3769 and http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/3778.

Before someone from usability team criticises the screenshot above, I only did that to test my changes in solid. Knm already has some code that allowed me to add my test code so I did it. That screen will get much more ugly until I finish my changes in solid, after that I plan to move some things (like the preference technology combo box above) to a better place.

As some people asked me, my changes to solid can be used in networkmanagement plasma applet too or any oher KDE program. I hope to finish my patch to solid by Akademy date since I am going to Akademy this year.

Solid and ModemManager

2010-05-14T17:05:00.002-03:00

Hi all,

This is my first post on planetkde. For those who do not know me, I live in Brazil (Minas Gerais state), I am also member of KDE-MG and use KDE since 1997. Although I have been using KDE (now KDE SC) for so long it was only last year I started to contribute more to KDE SC bug fixing and source code.

Last month, during Akademy-br, I started to work on implementing some features in knetworkmanager (knm). I use 3G Internet on traveling and miss some things, such as signal quality indicator (3G here in Brazil can be very unstable), statistics about speed, round-trip time (ping), and a way to force knm to use only HSDPA. Of course those things must be implemented in NetworkManager, or more recently in ModemManager, so that knm can make use of them. Some of those features are already implemented in ModemManager but to use them in knm solid, our hardware independent layer, must support them too.

I have implemented the first part of ModemManager support in solid and have some things working (signal quality indicator and network operator name to name the most important ones). The patch for solid and knm are in reviewboard.kde.org:

Adds preliminary ModemManager support to solid
Adds support to show signal quality and cellular operator name in tooltip.

For those who like screenshots, here they are:

Well, the operator " 31" (there is a space before the 31 number) is right according to my 3G modem (Sony MD300), I have checked it using the chat command. The wierd thing is that I can scan for all networks around and only my operator has this wierd name. My cell phone picks the correct name tough (TIM MG 37).

Today I have finished to implement dbus interfaces org.freedesktop.ModemManager and org.freedesktop.ModemManager.Modem.Gsm.Network, there are several other to implement according to the specification. I think the work will be done to be included in KDE SC 4.6.0 next year, so wish me luck :-)

Sager NP7652

2010-03-27T09:52:00.008-03:00

My new notebook/laptop has arrived yesterday, unfortunately with one stuck pixel :-((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( I have searched for ways to fix it, tried some things and it seems to be fixed now. The notebook is turned off now and I am using my old notebook (Acer Ferrari 4005). Honestly, I am with fear to turn the notebook on and see the dead pixel revived from the dead (or it would be from the living :-/). When I feel more relieved for solving this problem once and for all I will write a review/howto about how Gentoo Linux run on it. Update: as I feared when I turn the notebook on the stuck pixel is there again :-((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( Update2: today I have left the notebook to be sent back to Sager to replace the LCD, I do not stand that bright/stuck pixel. Let's see if Sager support is better than their quality control.

Meu novo notebook/laptop chegou ontem, infelizmente, com um stuck pixel :-((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( Fiquei um tempão procurando maneiras para corrigí-o, tentei algumas coisas e parece estar consertado agora. O notebook está desligado agora e estou usando meu antigo notebook (Acer Ferrari 4005). Honestamente, estou com medo de ligar o notebook e ver o dead pixel ressuscitado dentre os mortos (ou seria dentre os vivos :-/). Quanto estiver mais aliviado em resolver esse problema de uma vez por todas vou escrever uma avaliação/howto sobre como o Gentoo Linux roda nele. Atualização: como eu temia quanto eu ligo o notebook o stuck pixel está lá novamente :-(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( Atualização 2: hoje eu dexei o notebook para ser enviado de volta para a Sager para trocar o LCD, eu não suporto aquele pixel brilhante. Vamos ver se o suporte da Sager é melhor do que o controle de qualidade deles.

Samsung i8910: HX2.11 firmware

2010-03-12T04:31:00.003-03:00

New firmware released, there are a lot of minor changes compared to 2.02 and some big changes:

1. One of the big changes is that now the .exe formats C: and E: so you have to make a backup begore flashing it.

2. Switching from portraid to landscape is faster now.

3. Increase in heap memory, cache entries, CPU time, app framerate and other things. All that should make phone faster, we just do not know yet if that affects battery time.

4. There is a modem update too (ModemJB1.rar). Updating modem is not mandatory, but I usually do it, the order of upgraing (modem before firmware or vice-verse) does not matter.

Now the problems and warnings:

1. 3D Navigation vs changing profile in Finger Use home screen theme: in Finger Use theme you can change the profile by clicking on the date in home screen, after that you just need to click on the profile name, but if if 3D Navigation is enabled you have to press the profile name for a couple of seconds. 3D Navigation is enabled by default, you can disable it in menu -> Settings -> Personal -> Home screen -> 3D Navigation -> Disable.

2. After flashing the firmware the phone has problems to read files from E:. To solve the problem go to the file manager (menu -> Office -> File mgr.) and click on the E: drive.

3. As in all HyperX firmwares the Music Player only search for .mp3 in C:/Music and F:/Music.

4. Some people has problem with camera image sparkling under white flourescent light. It seem related to power line frequency (HX2.11 JB1 is said to have this problem in countries that use 50 Hz in their power lines).

Future modifications:

. Andy (HyperX) made some changes to improve framerate on HD video recording (1280x720i), it seems now the phone is capable of recording in constant 23.75 fps framerate.

=====
Novo firmware lançado, há uma série de pequenas alterações em comparação com a HX 2.02 e algumas grandes mudanças:

1. Uma das grandes mudanças é que agora o .exe format os drives C: e E:, então você tem que fazer um backup antes the instalar o firmware.

2. Mudar a tela de retrato para paisagem é mais rápido agora.

3. Aumento de memória heap, entradas de cache, tempo de CPU, taxa de atualização dos aplicativos dentre outras coisas. Tudo isso deve fazer do aparelho mais rápido, só não sabemos ainda se isso afeta o tempo de bateria.

4. Há uma atualização do modem também (ModemJB1.rar). A atualização do modem não é obrigatória, mas eu costumo fazê-la. A ordem de atualização (modem antes de firmware ou vice-verso) não importa.

Agora, os problemas e as advertências:

1. Navegação 3D vs mudança de perfil no tema Finger Use na tela inicial: no tema Finger Use você pode alterar o perfil clicando na data da tela inicial, depois que você só precisa clicar no nome do perfil, mas se a Navegação 3D está habilitada você tem que apertar o nome do perfil por alguns segundos. A Navegação 3D é ativada por padrão, você pode desabilitá-lo no menu -> Configurações -> Pessoal -> Tela inicial -> Navegação 3D -> Desativar.

2. Depois de atualizar o firmware, o aparelho tem problemas para ler arquivos do E:. Para resolver o problema vá no gerenciador de arquivos (Menu -> Office -> Gerenciador arquivo) e clique na unidade E:.

3. Como em todos os firmwares HyperX o tocador de música pesquisa mp3 somente no C:/Music e F:/Music.

4. Algumas pessoas tem problemas com a imagem da câmera cintilando sob luz fluorescente branca. Isso parece relacionado à freqüência de alimentação da tomada (HX2.11 JB1 parece ter esse problema em países que usam 50 Hz nas tomadas).

Futuras modificações:

. Andy (HyperX) fez algumas mudanças para melhorar a taxa de atualização nas gravações de vídeo HD (1280x720i), parece que agora o aparelho é capaz de gravar vídeo a uma taxa constante de 23,75 quadros por segundo.

Notebook cooler (2)

2010-02-14T01:04:00.003-02:00

The Cooler Master R9-NBC-BWCB-GP has arrived today. Well, it does not cool as good I hoped, but at least it has a extra USB port, which is helpfull. Here in Minas Gerais is very hot these days, my room at afternoon is about 30 to 32 degrees Celsius. My notebook's hard drive stay at 45C in with this notebook cooler. Unfortunately the hard drive and south bridge of my notebook are in the front, where R9-NBC-BWCB-GP is less effective, so I put my notebook as above as possible so the air flux hit the hard drive, it works better this way. I am using a external keyboard, if I would use the notebook at that position and the R9-NBC-BWCB-GP on my lap I would risk let the notebook drop to the floor. I think there must be better notebook coolers out there, this one is the second I have bought and I am not satisfied yet.

O ooler Master R9-NBC-BWCB-GP chegou hoje. Bem, ele não esfria tanto quanto gostaria, mas pelo menos ele tem uma porta extra, o que é útil. Aqui em Minas Gerais está muito quente estes dias, meu quarto à tarde fica entre 30 e 32 graus Celsius. O HD do meu notebook fica em 45C com este notebook cooler. Infelizmente o disco rígido e o south bridge do meu notebook ficam na parte da frente, onde o R9-NBC-BWCB-GP é menos eficiente, então eu coloquei o notebook mais pra cima para que o fluxo de ar atinja o HD, ele funciona melhor assim. Eu usando um teclado externo, se eu usar o notebook nesta posição com o R9-NBC-BWCB-GP no colo eu arriscaria deixar o notebook cair no chão. Eu acho que deve haver notebook coolers melhores por aí, este é o segundo que eu compro e ainda não estou satisfeito.

KDE 4.4

2010-02-11T00:40:00.001-02:00

Well, yesterday I upgraded my notebook to KDE SC 4.4, after some adjustments everything is working now. Most changes passed almost unnoticed by me, but three of them got my attention: 1. In Kopete, the Wlm plugin now notifies when there are unread e-mails and can open inbox too. That one indeed got my attention because most of it was implemented by me :-) 2. There is a battery widget in Notification plasmoid, that is great because it takes less space than the battery plasmoid and stay hidden when there is no battery connected (something I wanted for a long time). 3. Not everything are flowers (as we say in Brazil)... the notification plasmoid now has a annoying tab that get in the way if you do not enable its auto-hide feature. I do not enable it because my implementation of unread e-mail in Kopete Wlm plugin uses a permanent notification that is hidden if auto-hide is enabled. So now I have this annoying tab, I will change that in the notification plasmoid when I get more time.

Bem, ontem atualizei meu notebook para o KDE SC 4.4, depois de alguns ajustes tudo está funcionando agora. A maioria das mudanças passou despercebida por mim, mas três delas chamaram minha atenção: 1. No Kopete, o plugin Wlm agora avisa quando há e-mails não lidos e permite abrir a caixa de entrada também. Esta mudança com certeza chamou minha atenção por a maior parte dela foi implementada por mim :-) 2. Agora tem um widget de bateria no plasmoid de notificação, isso é ótimo porque ele ocupa menos espaço que o plasmoid de bateria e fica escondido quando não há bateria conectada (algo que eu queria já a muito tempo). 3. Tem tudo são flores... o plasmoid de notificação agora tem uma aba irritante que fica no caminho se você não habilitar o auto esconder. Eu não habilitado isso porque a minha implementação de e-mails não lidos no plugin Wlm do Kopete usa notificação permanente que fica escondida se o auto esconder estiver habilitado. Agora eu tenho essa aba irritante, eu vou isso no plasmoid de notificação quando eu tiver mais tempo.

Notebook cooler

2010-02-09T16:11:00.002-02:00

I have ordered one of those Cooler Master R9-NBC-BWCB-GP notebook cooler. I was given very good review on Amazon. Let's see if it really deserves the good reputation. It will probably arrive here next Saturday or Monday (if the Carnival does not make it to get late).

Comprei um desses notebook cooler R9-NBC-BWCB-GP da Cooler Master. Ele teve boas recomendações no site da Amazon. Vamos ver se ele realmente merece a boa reputação. Ele deverá chegar aqui no próximo sábado ou segunda (isso se o Carnaval não atrasar a entrega).

Samsung i8910: HX2.02 firmware

2010-02-07T19:44:00.002-02:00

Today I have upgraded my Samsung i8910 cell phone's firmware to HX2.02 (an alternative firmware "cooked" by HyperX). The new Nero II HD theme is very slick and this firmware makes things look faster than the previous one (HX1.31_speed). The only two regressions are the fact that I cannot scroll Smartsettings' shortcuts anymore, so I can only see the first nine shortcuts. The second regression is the shortcut button in LBS Navigation that closes the application instead of showing the shortcuts. I already knew that would happen by what I read in Hyper's web site, but I wanted to have the Dictionary application back, that is a proprietary payed application that was removed in HX1.31_speed. Now I have it back and working :-)

Hoje eu atualizei o firmware do my celular Samsung i8910 para a versão HX2.02 (um firmware alternativo "cozinhado" pelo HyperX). O novo tema Nero II HD é muito ajeitado e este firmware faz as coisas parecerem mais rápidas do que na versão anterior (HX1.31_speed). As duas únicas regressões são o fato de não poder rolar os atalhos do Smartsettings, por isso só consigo ver os primeiros nove atalhos. A segunda regressão é o botão de atalho do LBS Navigation que fecha a applicação ao invés de mostrar os atalhos. Eu sabia que isso iria acontecer pelo que li no site do HyperX, mas eu queria a aplicação de dicionário de volta, esta é uma aplicação proprietária paga que foi removida da HX1.31_speed. Agora eu a tenho de volta e funcionando :-)

Ubuntu users using Windows for the first time / Usuários de Ubuntu usando Windows pela primeira vez

2010-02-06T01:06:00.001-02:00

This one is only in Brazilian Portuguese (este é só em português):

http://olhardigital.uol.com.br/central_de_videos/video_wide.php?id_conteudo=9634

Briefing: the kids are more used to Ubuntu and like it best.
Resumindo: os garotos estão mais acostumados com Ubuntu e gostam mais dele.

Future Acquisition / Futura Aquisição: SAGER NP7652

2010-02-05T13:11:00.005-02:00

Very interesting this new Sager NP7652 notebook. It has almost all those things I like in my current notebook (Acer Ferrari 4005) and very good price. The only things I would lose compared to F4005 would be: one less USB port, one less speed button, no expansion port, no DVI, no S-video, no infra-red and no fireware ports. Well, I would only miss the USB and S-video ports, the other ones are not that usefull anyway (I have never used the expansion and firewire ports, and have used the DVI and infra-red only for testing). I just would like to have the option to buy faster memory (1066 MHz is good, but I would like to buy 1333 MHz instead). In the future I will probably buy a USB 3.0 express card to have two more USB ports. More info about this notebook, including videos and benchmarks.

Muito interessante este novo notebook Sager NP7652. Ele tem quase todas as coisas que eu gosto no meu notebook atual (Acer Ferrari 4005) e um ótimo preco. As únicas coisas que eu perderia comparado com o F4005 seriam: uma porta USB a menos, um botão de atalho a menos e portas de expansão, DVI, S-video, infra-vermelho e firewire. Bem, I sentiria falta das portas USB e S-vide, as outras nem tanto (nunca usei as portas de expansão e firewire, e só usei DVI e infra-vermelho para testes). Gostaria de ter a opção de comprar memórias mais rápidas (1066 MHz é bom mas gostaria de comprar 1333 MHz). No futuro devo comprar um cartão express USB 3.0 para ter duas portas USB a mais. Mais informações sobre esse notebook, includindo vídeos e avaliações de desempenho.

Xorg: key stuck problem / Xorg: problema com teclas agarrando

2010-02-05T12:42:00.003-02:00

I think my Xorg/kernel has this problem: http://ajaxxx.livejournal.com/62378.html, randomly Xorg sometimes ignores the release event of those four keys Ctrl, Alt, Shift and Meta. That article has the explanation for the problem and a possible solution will be in kernel 2.6.33. The solution solved 99% of the problem, great :-)

Acho que meu Xorg/kernel tem esse problema: http://ajaxxx.livejournal.com/62378.html, aleatoriamente o Xorg de vez em quando ignora o evento de "liberar" para essas quatro teclas: Ctrl, Alt, Shift e Meta. O artigo tem a explicação para o problema e uma possível solução estará no kernel 2.6.33. A solução resolveu 99% do problem, ótimo :-)

ATI/AMD x700 + KMS + DRI2

2010-02-05T12:18:00.005-02:00

Hi all, a new blog today (after almost a year hehe). Yesterday I tried to make KMS work in my notebook (Ferrari 4005), it is a old notebook but I like it a lot, it has some neat things in there. For those that do not know what KMS is read this. In short KMS is a new graphical infra-estructure for Linux kernel that solves the ethernal conflicts betweewn kernel's graphical drivers (be it text mode driver, framebuffer vesa driver or framebuffer chipset specific driver) and Xorg's drivers. Whoever used the Ctrl+Alt+Fx key combination in Xorg knows that there is a delay when changing from Xorg to text mode, with KMS that today is gone and the graphical driver is, in theory, much less sucetible to problems. Well, I followed the instruction in here and now I have KMS working with my x700 video card (rv410 chipset) :-) and it works really great :-)) One of the bonus of using KMS is that is also solves the conflicts between DRI2 and composite effects (like the famous Cube Effect), which means that I can use composite effects and Googleearth together, that one is the main reason I configured KMS in my notebook. I also had to apply those two patches to solve a problem with suspend (tuxonice).

Olá a todos, um novo blog hoje (depois de quase um ano hehe). Ontem eu tentei fazer o KMS funcionar no meu notebook (Ferrari 405), é um notebook antigo mas eu gosto muito dele, ele tem umas coisas bem arrumadinhas nele. Pra quem não sabe o que é KMS leia isso. Resumindo, KMS é uma infra-estrutura de vídeo para o kernel do Linux que resolve o eterno conflitos entre os drivers gráficos do kernel (seja o driver modo texto, o driver vesa de framebuffer ou o driver de framebuffer específico de cada chipset) e o driver de vídeo do Xorg. Quem já usou a combinação de teclas Ctrl+Alt+Fx no Xorg sabe que existe um atraso quando se muda do Xorg para o modo texto, com o KMS não existe mais atraso e o driver gráfico é, em teoria, muito menos sucestível a problemas. Bem, eu segui as instruções daqui e agora eu tenho o KMS funcionando com a minha placa de vídeo x700 (chipset rv410) :-) e funciona muito bem :-)) Um dos bonus de usar o KMS é que ele também resolve os conflitos entre o DRI2 e os efeitos composite (como o famoso efeito de Cubo), o que significa que eu agora eu posso usar os efeitos composite junto com o Googleearth, aliás essa é a razão principal de eu ter configurado o KMS no meu notebook. Também tive que aplicar esses dois patches para resolver um problem com o suspend (tuxonice).

FISL 2009

2009-05-29T18:15:00.003-03:00

Hi everybody (or nobody hehe), some friends of mine and I are going to FISL 2009 in Porto Alegre next month (June). It is going to be my first time in Rio Grande do Sul, I hope I enjoy it as I have enjoied Curitiba some years ago.

Olá a todos (ou ninguém hehe), alguns amigos e eu vamos ao FISL 2009 em Porto Alegre mês que vem (junho). Será minha primeira vez no Rio Grane do Sul, espero que seja tão legal quanto minha ida a Curitiba há alguns anos atrás.

And time goes on... / E o tempo passa...

2009-03-11T13:29:00.000-03:00

After two months there is no that many things going on. I bought a 3G modem, from Claro, 500 kbps. It works very well here in Divinópolis, Belo Horizonte and I have even tested it in Ribeirão das Neves. I have also bought a new external keyboard for my notebook on http://www.ergocube.com. Unfortunately they sent me the wrong model of the keyboard, I wanted a ergonomic and USB plug one, they sent me a non-ergonomic and PS/2 plug. What intriges the most is the fact the site is speciallized in ergonomic stuff and send me a non-ergonic keyboard :-( I did not sed it back because of: 1. They have not answered none of my e-mails. I will never buy anything on that site, they sell expensive stuff (I could have bought this PS/2 keyboard on another site, but I wanted the USB version that only they sell), sent the wrong product and do not answer e-mails. 2. I have paid import taxes of almost 96% :-( so it would be much more expensive to pay the taxes again for the right keyboard. Even worse: I had to buy a USB HUB with to PS/2 ports to use the keyboard, so far so good, but the multimedia keys do not work and I am almost certain it is because I am using the PS/2 <-> USB converter of the USB HUB. So I will have to live with this keyboard without the multimedia keys :-/ Ah, I have almost forgot. I have also bought a powerball :-)

Depois de dois meses não tem multa coisa acontecendo. I comprei um modem 3G, da Claro, 500 kbps. Funciona muito bem aqui em Divinópolis, Belo Horizonte e eu testei inclusive em Ribeirão das Neves. Também comprei um teclado externo para o meu notebook na http://www.ergocube.com. Infelizmente, eles me enviaram o modelo errado do teclado, eu queria um ergonômico e com plug USB, eles me mandaram um não-ergonômico e com plug PS/2. O que mais me intriga é que eles são especializados em produtos ergonômicos e me enviaram um teclado não-ergonômico :-( Não o enviei de volta porque: 1. Eles não respondem nenhum dos meus e-mails. Nunca mais compro lá, eles vendem coisas caras (eu poderia ter comprado esse teclado PS/2 por metade do preço em outro site, mas eu queria a versão USB, que só tinha neste site), enviaram o produto errado e não respondem meus e-mails. 2. Eu paguei imposto de importação de quase 96% :-( ficaria muito caro pagar os impostos pelo teclado certo. Pior ainda: tive que comprar um HUB USB com portas PS/2 para usar o teclado, até aí tudo bem, só que as teclas multimídia não funcionam e estou quase certo de que é porque estou usando o conversor PS/2 <-> USB do HUB. Então vou ter que ficar com esse teclado sem as teclas multimídia :-/ Ah, quase esqueci, também comprei uma powerball :-)

After a long time... / Depois de muito tempo...

2009-01-08T13:48:00.000-02:00

Well, I think I do not like this blog thing that much hehe. Nowadays I am still working at home, staying too much time at home is angustiating. I need to find something else to do, maybe going to gym again, music lesson or dancing lessons as a friend of mine told me.

Bem, acho que não gosto muito deste negócio de blog hehe. Atualmente ainda trabalho em casa, passar muito tempo em casa é angustiante. Preciso achar outra coisa para fazer, talvez voltar a frequentar academia, aulas de música ou aulas de dança como uma amiga minha me falou.

I am back :-) / Estou de volta

2008-09-24T00:02:00.001-03:00

Several things happened during those almost 10 months. I am working at home and living with my parents and my brother again, which is much better finantially speaking hehe. I also like to live with them, we are very close I and missed them when I lived in Belo Horizonte. My eyes are not as good as I thought they would be by this time :-(, I am going to talk to the doctor and hear what could be done about that. I can see well, but not as good as when I used to use glasses. I had started dating Ruth in March but now we are not dating anymore, we are still friends. I am still with my old car (a Honda Civic 1994), but not driving that much, that is one of the things I miss from Belo Horizonte, I really like driving hehe.

Várias coisas aconteceram durante esses últimos 10 meses. Estou trabalhando de casa e morando novamente com meus pais e meu irmão, o que é muito bom financeiramente falando hehe. Também gosto de morar com eles, somos bem próximos e sentia falta deles quando morava em Belo Horizonte. Meus olhos não estão tão bons quanto pensei que estariam a essa altura :-( Vou conversar com o oftalmologista e ouvir o que pode ser feito sobre isso. Consigo enxergar bem, mas não tão bem quanto quando usava óculos. Eu tinha começado a namorar a Ruth em março mas agora estamos separados, ainda somos amigos. Ainda estou com o meu velho carro (um Honda Civic 1994), mas não estou dirigindo muito, essa é uma das coisas que sinto falta de Belo Horizonte, eu realmente gosto de dirigir hehe.

I can see it! / Eu posso ver

2007-12-08T21:40:00.000-02:00

Well, several weeks have passed after my last post, I think do not like this blog thing hehe. But this news deserves to be registered somewhere :-) I can see (almost) perfectly again. I explain, yesterday I submited to a miopia surgery. I still cannot see as I was wearing lenses, but I do not have miopia anymore. In some weeks my vision will improve even more. Does anyone want to buy three pairs of used glasses? :-)

Bem, muitas semanas se passaram desde minha última mensagem, acho que não servo para esse negócio de blog hehe, mas essa notícia merecia ser registrada em algum lugar :-) I consigo enxergar (quase) perfeitamente de novo. Eu explico, ontem fiz cirurgia de miopia. Ainda não enxergo tão bem quanse se estivesse usando lentes, mas já não tenho mais miopia. Em algumas semanas minha visão irá melhorar mais ainda. Alguém aí quer comprar três pares de óculos usados? ;-)

I am back... / Estou de volta...

2007-09-23T22:05:00.000-03:00

Well, after the trips I still feel tired... maybe I need to go back to Cabo Frio :-) This week we are going to receive visitors from the other side of the world (more precisely from China). Hmmm I should start studying mandarin.

Bem, depois das viagens ainda me sinto cançado... talvez eu precise voltar a Cabo Frio :-) Esta semana vamos receber visitas do outro lado do mundo (mais precisamente da China). Hmmm acho que eu deveria começar a estudar mandarin.

Weekend / Fim de semana

2007-09-06T15:16:00.000-03:00

Today I am going to Cabo Frio (litoral of state of Rio de Janeiro) :-) I will be back on Monday (10)... and going to Brasília (capital of Brazil) some hours later, so do not expect meeting me until next Wednesday (12)... Friday (14) I am going to Divinópolis (countryside of state of Minas Gerais). Well, it will be a long trip :-)

Hoje eu vou para Cabo Frio :-) Voltarei na segunda-feira (10)... e vou para Brasília algumas horas depois, então não espere me encontrar até quarta-feita (12)... Sexta (13) eu vou para Divinópolis. Bem, será uma longa viagem :-)

What a weekend / Que final de semana

2007-09-02T23:11:00.000-03:00

I have never worked so much in a weeked like this one. I at least hope it will worth it, we will see in two weeks time :-) This post will stop here, I need resting :-)

Nunca trabalhei tanto em um final de semana como este. Pelo menos eu espero que tenha valido à pena, vamos ver em duas semana :-) Essa mensagem acaba por aqui, preciso descansar :-)

I went to "Big Pork" Yesterday / Fui ao Porcão ontem

2007-08-28T16:31:00.000-03:00

OBS: Porcão (Big Pork in Portuguese) is a high society restaurant here in Belo Horizonte. For the ones who does not know, "Belo Horizonte" means Beautiful Horizon and is the city I live in.

I went to Porcão yesterday night with two work mates, there was a 50% price cut promotion :-) Several work mates of mine were talking about going there for weeks, but someone always had excuses to not to go. Well, yesterday we three decided to go without the others (bad for them hahaha). There is a wonderfull view from Belo Horizonte when looking throught restaurant's windows. The food was tastefull, for the price (even with the promotion) it must really be. I let my card at work since Porcão is near where I work at. When I got back to pick my car my key did not opened the front door :-/ Today I verified that the key has been bad made and it only, barely, close the door but does not open it, what back lucky. Well, after fifteen minutes trying I gave up and went home by taxi.

Fui ao Porcão ontem com dois colegas de trabalho, tinha uma promoção de 50% de desconto :-) Há várias semanas colegas de trabalho já falavam em ir lá e na última hora alguém arranjava uma desculpa para não ir. Ontem nós três decidimos ir sem os outros (ruim para elas hehe). A vista da janela é maravilhosa, a comida muito saborosa e tinha quer ser mesmo pelo preço (mesmo com a promoção). Deixei meu carro no trabalho já que o Porcão é perto de onde trabalho. Quando voltei para pegar o carro minha chave não abriu a porta da frente do prédio :-/ Hoje eu verifiquei que a chave foi mal feita e só fecha, com dificuldade, a porta, mas não abre. Bem, depois de quinze minutos tentando resolvi voltar para casa de táxi.

KDE has everything / KDE tem de tudo

2007-08-27T15:28:00.001-03:00

kdegirls-control

I thought I have seen all kind of programs before hahahaha.

Pensei que já tive visto tudo quando é tipo de programa antes hahahaha.