Re: gnome-ppp [was: Re: the future of GNOME Applets]

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 23:57 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 16:49 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> > On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 11:43 -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > > HAL love would be good - you currently have to manually select your
> > > modem.  It would be a simple change, I imagine, to make it query the
> > > list of available modems and provide a drop-down selection vs just
> > > entering the device path.
> 
> > Last time I looked HAL didn't handle serial devices, or does it these
> > days?
> 
> I don't have any serial ports... this makes it hard to test. I suspect
> it can't handle them. It probably could know about USB modems though,
> and internal PCI modems (driver support pending).
> 

Kay Sievers is actually working on adding this to HAL - it requires a
bit of kernel work to properly support legacy x86 serial lines (the
kernel presently say something like here's /dev/ttyS0 through /dev/ttyS7
even on my Powerbook without any serial ports)  but today HAL actually
knows about USB gizmo's that provide a serial line. USB modems shouldn't
be too difficult to properly detect as well.

In my view, the most clean solution from an architectural point of view
would be for HAL to somehow to provide information like "here's a serial
line", "here's a modem" and get NetworkManager (that Seth Nickell
mentioned here on Aug 26) or some other framework with a clear
system/session split to provide functionality to look for modems etc.,
autodetect modems, initiate dialing etc.

> Personally (now we're getting real off-topic) I want HAL to support
> UPSes with the same interface they are planning to use to support laptop
> batteries. Then the GNOME battery monitor will be able to report
> information from your UPS on your desktop, sehr chic!
> 

Heh, patches are always welcome :-). I don't own a UPS.

Cheers,
David