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Friday, April 19, 2013

Solid Forge 2

Some of you may have noticed that there are some KDE sprints happening right now. One of them is Forge 2, the Solid sprint. If you do not know what Solid is you should be ashamed. Everytime you configure a network connection, change screen brightness, use a bluetooth device, insert a usb stick and Device Notifier pops up it is because Solid is working to make that happen for you. Solid abstracts the computer hardware and makes it simpler to create programs that helps the user to control their computer's hardware.

As the maintainer of network management in KDE I am really interested in making things work better and better in Solid, not only for network management. The sprint started last Thursday and I finally met the guys from RedHat, which by the way are hosting Forge this year. I was particularly interested in meeting them because they have been doing a good work in improving NetworkManagerQt library (yes, former libnm-qt changed its name again) and creating a new applet for NetworkManager. Both the current applet (in networkmanagement repository's master branch) and the new one (in plasma-nm repository) share NetworkManagerQt library. One of my wishes for NetworkManagerQt was to move the dbus parsing code from networkmanagement to it. Now that is a reality thanks to Jan Grulich (one of our RedHat hosts). I also need to thank Lukáš Tinkl and Daniel Nicoletti for their work on improving NetworkManagerQt.

The list of things to improve in the new applet and in network management in general includes several items. We are going to discuss those items and tackle them in the next months. It also good to know that there are some GSoC candidates interested in working in KDE's network management :-) This year looks promising for KDE's network managment.

PS: Today we finally removed Solid::Control from kde-workspace (yeah!!) One step ahead to simplify libsolid.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are there plans to add connman support to solid? I'd really like to see a Qt/KDE-based frontend for it with WPA-Enterprise support.

Lamarque said...

No, no plans. Connman is more common in embedded systems, which usually do not use KDE software. NetworkManager on the other hand in used in almost all Linux distributions, which covers most our users. Unfortunately, NetworkManager does not run in FreeBSD and other Unix as far as I know.

Lamarque said...

By the way, anybody can port libnm-qt to use connman and recompile networkmanagement's master branch or plasma-nm to use it. I think it would be complicated doing that since connman and NetworkManager have very different specifications for their dbus interfaces.

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