Re: [gnome-love] Modem dialup in gnome

[Mark <sisob eircom net>]

> I've been thinking in this problem too, some ideas spring to mind, but
> unfortunately all of them would need GST to work:

What do you mean by "need GST to work"? Does it not work atm?

> * A dialer applet in the notification area, using the network-admin
> backends to display all possible dial connections, and of course using the
> network-admin druid for creating new ones

I don't think that that's what the notification area was designed for.
It makes much more sense to me to use it to display an icon to represent
an active ppp connection, and to allow the user to hang up that
connection.

It'd also be cool to have the option to display an icon for ethernet and
dsl, ala winXP/2000

> * A nautilus view/URI to display all possible dial connections, with the
> possibility to add/remove, connect/disconnect and view properties, using
> network-admin below...
>
> * A mixture of them, so when you connect using the nautilus view, the
> applet appears in the notification area...

If I was to go with nautilus is would do both of the above. You have a
uri that displays all possible network and modem connections. From there
you can dial your modem connections, and activate/deactivate your
network connections if you have the right permissions. You can also edit
the connections with the network-admin tool, or create new connections.

I'm not sure about this though,
For:
* It provides a user-level tool where the user can create connections,
drag links to connections to the desktop or panel, choose whether they
want network connections shown in the notification area and view the
status of current connections. None of these features are currently
avaliable in a user-level tool.
* Feels integrated with gnome
* Users of "other" oses will be at home with the concept
* Nautilus may be a filemanager, and maybe I used windows for too long,
but network connections make sense to me displayed similarly to files.

Against:
* As Alex says nautilus is a file manager/viewer and is overused
* A normal dialog might be simpler. Activating/deactivating connections
and editing them with network-admin could very easily be handled by a
normal dialog, as could having a notification area applet appear once
you've dialed. One thing you would probably loose is the ability to drag
and drop a link to a specific connecion and I'm not sure how you would
fit in the ability to choose if you want an ethernet conenction shown in
your notificion area.
* Probably easier to program a normal dialog

> Nothing of this should be in the "gnome-system-tools" module, maybe a
> "gnome-system-tools-extras" module?

Or a gnome-modem-dialer module? Guess it's too late to get this into 2.4
:) Especially since it's not even started.

> >> - Connection sharing (a-la NAT)
> >
> > Yeah, this would rock. In it's simplest form it's just a few firewall
> > rules right? We could look at how firestarter does it.
> >
> > We'd also want to make this possible for dsl and isdn.
> 
> I think could be more a firewall-admin issue (which is not developed) than
> a network-admin issue, so integrating this in the GST will be slower...
> but it's a "to do" :-)

Yeah, personally I'd much prefer to see people using firestarter for
this as that's what it's designed for.

Later

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