Plasma NM: very important (old) news

Hi guys. Just to keep it clear: since the release of the new Plasma NM applet (version 0.9.3) the networkmanagement repository is mostly deprecated. Only NM/0.9 branch has any use (for now). That branch holds the old stable Plasma NM 0.9.0.x version. The one that I release from time to time since October 2011.

Unless you have a patch to fix one of bugs in the old Plasma NM 0.9.0.x you should use plasma-nm repository instead of networkmanagement. There is even a frameworks branch in plasma-nm, so it already works with frameworks5, which networkmanagement does not.

ModemManagerQt 0.5.1 Released

Well, less than one week from ModemManagerQt's first release now it is time for the second release. I take the blame for this, I forgot to review a patch needed by KDE Telepathy's SMS sending feature. That is an important feature, so I decided to do a new release to make it work properly.

Plasma NM: current and future

As you may already know a new Plasma NM 0.9.3.0 applet was released last week, which means that Plasma NM 0.9.0.x is deprecated from now on. I will release Plasma NM 0.9.0.10 eventually to fix bugs already reported against 0.9.0.9. For those who can I advise to upgrade to the new Plasma NM applet.

To upgrade to the new applet you must first disable the old applet's plasmoid and kded modules. You can do that in systemsettings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Service Manager. Stop and uncheck "NetworkManager User Settings Service" then click on the "Apply" button:

To remove the old applet right click on the system tray applet's small triangle (the one that shows "Show hidden icons" tooltip) then "System Tray Settings" -> Display -> Extra Items. Uncheck the "Network Management" item that has a icon similar to a N letter, then click on the "Ok" button:

Bugs against the new applet must be reported in bugs.kde.org under product plasma-nm. Please do not report bugs against the new applet under "Network Management" product, that one is reserved for Plasma NM 0.9.0.x bugs.

The Future of ModemManagerQt and NetworkManagerQt

Now that the first release of MMQt 0.5.0 and NMQt 0.9.0 are online it is time to think about what else we can do with/for them.

MMQt 0.5.x is behind current stable ModemManager version (1.0) not only in version number but also in API compatibility (MMQt 0.5.x does not work with ModemManager >= 0.7). MMQt 0.8 is going to support ModemManager 0.7 API and is currently being developed in mm08 branch. I plan to merge mm08 into MMQt master branch soon, so anybody using MMQt master branch (e.g. Plasma Active) should point your build scripts to MM/0.5 branch instead of master from now on. The same is valid for NMQt: point to NM/0.9 branch instead of master.

We plan to release MMQt 0.8 as soon as possible. However no release date has been set yet, the date depends mostly on the two developers that are working on that part (Lukáš Tinkl and Anant Kamath). I wanted to thank them for taking over that job, I am really short on free time in the last months. I would not be able to port MMQt to 0.7 API without help since there are some fundamental changes to implement. Remember NetworkManager 0.8 to 0.9 transition? It is something similar in ModemManager 0.6 to 0.7 transition.

Turning to NMQt. Things there seems more calm than for MMQt, no big API changes in sight. Dan Williams, help me when NetworkManager 1.0 is released, ok? hehe.

For NMQt I plan to improve current documentation and fix reported bugs. Talking about bugs, you can report bugs in http://bugs.kde.org under product solid components networkmanagement (for NMQt) and networkmanagement-mobile (for MMQt).

PS: I will talk about Plasma NM 0.9.0.x and Plasma NM 0.9.3.x in another post.

NetworkManagerQt 0.9.0 Released

After a long awaiting I am glad to announce that the first release of NetworkManagerQt is available for downloading. The (short) announcement is available in NetworkManagerQt's project page.

Both NetworkManagerQt and ModemManagerQt are dependencies for the new Plasma NM applet. There are still rough edges to polish in NetworkManagerQt, specially in documentation, we are going to fix them in the next releases. Talking about documentation it is available through doxygen (read project's page for instructions). There is also two example programs to list device's properties (ip address, gateway, static routes, dns, etc) and to create wifi connections.

ModemManagerQt 0.5.0 Released

After a long awaiting I am glad to announce that the first release of ModemManagerQt is available for downloading. The (short) announcement is available in ModemManagerQt's project page.

kwin and catalyst drivers

Today I have upgraded my notebook to 4.11.0. Almost everything worked out of the box, the only exception was kwin's compositing support.

Just for clarify I use the catalyst drivers (AKA fglrx, AKA ATI/AMD's proprietary graphical drivers) because only catalyst can control my notebook's fan. I have tried the opensource driver but my notebook's bios does not provide the gpu profiles required to make the dynamic clock support in the opensource driver to work, so I am stuck with catalyst.

Looking at ~/.xsession-errors I could see those messages:

OpenGL vendor string:                   ATI Technologies Inc.

OpenGL renderer string:                 ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500/5100 Series

OpenGL version string:                  2.1 (3.3.11672 Compatibility Profile Context)

OpenGL shading language version string: 

Driver:                                 Catalyst

Driver version:                         2.1

GPU class:                              R700

OpenGL version:                         2.1

GLSL version:                           0.0

X server version:                       1.12.4

Linux kernel version:                   3.10.6

Direct rendering:                       no

Requires strict binding:                yes

GLSL shaders:                           yes

Texture NPOT support:                   yes

Virtual Machine:                        no

kwin(17322) KWin::checkGLError: GL error ( Init ):  "GL_INVALID_ENUM" 

kwin(17322): OpenGL 1 compositing setup failed 

QObject::connect: Cannot connect (null)::resetCompositing() to KWin::Compositor::restart()

kwin(17322): Failed to initialize compositing, compositing disabled

For some reason kwin does not detect that my notebook's setup is direct rendering capable. After some research I have found out that setting those two environment variables make kwin work with direct rendering:

export KWIN_DIRECT_GL=1

export KWIN_COMPOSE=O2

To make changes permanent you can write the lines above to a file script like /etc/profile.d/env.sh. That works for bash, if you use another shell then you need to figure out how to set environment variables for it. Then you can logout and login and kwin should work. If you do not want to logout you can just run those two lines above and then the command below:

kwin --replace &

KWIN_COMPOSE=O2 means to use OpenGL2 according to kwin's wiki page and by the message above kwin was trying to use OpenGL1. Well, for anybody with the same problem that is a workaround for it :-)

Update: bug entry about this issue: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323553