NetworkManager for PDAs

[Milan Plzik <milan plzik gmail com>]

  Hello,

  I'm currently starting work on a project, which has the same aims as
NetworkManager has for desktops (to be more precise, I already wrote
some design specs and after studying NM's sources I found out that
everything is already implemented - original specification is on
http://www.handhelds.org/~mmp :). I would like to create port of
NetworkManager daemon for PDAs and a bit extend its functionality, but I
would like to cooperate with you as much as possible to not create
unneccessary fork of NM.

  Here are some things which are important for the PDA port:

  1) libhal dependency - there is no port of hald/libhal for PDAs yet,
so there is need to work around this for a while. I have actually two
solutions which are feasible - #ifdef-ing the code, or creating stub
libhal, which would handle somehow all the calls used in NM. I would
like to keep the changes to NM's sources as small as possible - if there
is any other solution which I overlooked, please let me know.

  2) Is there any support for power management in NM? Maybe there could
be some automatic tuning of power management according to traffic
(intensive power management for icq/irc-like traffic, no power
management for speed-demanding downloads). Again, this is just an idea;
please correct me if I made some mistake here.

  3) I have not yet studied how does NM handle USB pc-to-pc connection
devices; if there is no support, I would like to add it, because this is
one of the quite important networking possibilities on PDAs.

  4) Is there anyone working on Bluetooth PAN support? If not, I would
like to try to write some basic support for bluetooth networks.

  5) Wifi adapter on PDA I have for testing uses chipset at76c503a,
which was reported to not work with NM.
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/50240 . If there is no solution for this yet, maybe I could hack around this a little.

  These are, of course, just an ideas. I will probably be mostly working
on #1 and #5 these days, as this is requirement for further development.
After finishing, I will try to implement some applet for PDA
configuration and then move to other numbers in the list above:).

  If you have any comments/suggestions/complaints about things I wrote,
please reply me (ideally Cc to my address; until now I have not received
acceptance of my networkmanager-list registration). 

  Thank you,

	Milan Plzik