Re: [gnome-love] Gnome2 ppp application

[Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>]

> I've also been thinking about this and coincidentally also produced some glade mockups 
> a couple of days ago (see attached screengrabs). Perhaps this discussion will even spur me to do some 
> coding!

They look pretty cool. Perhaps you could look at Paul's ideas too and
see about encorperating them into yours.


> My thoughts were to simply exec pppd & wvdial rather then call wvdial libraries. 
> afaik you can only do dial-on-demand with the 'pppd calls wvdial' method and not the
> 'wvdial calls pppd' method. Without demand-dial,  connection sharing (a-la NAT) is not
> so useful imo. A solution with dial-on-demand and connection sharing would be waaay cool
> even though it makes the task considerably more complicated (cross-platform issues, root account 
> issues...). 
> It's important for small office or home network.

My opinion would be that dial on demand and connection sharing are
something that should be left up to the distros as they are really
server not desktop. If we can get a really reliable but simple modem
dialer into gnome, and have time left over to add these features, then
why not, but what we really need now is a simple but rock solid dialer.

> Any other opinions or ideas?

IMHO this is a really important part that is currently missing from
gnome. I'm surprised that the flamers haven't latched on to it more.
When you sit down to gnome atm it is not obvious how to connect to the
net.

We need a simple solution, that will work well with the tools already
out there. For example redhat and some others(kppp?) use standard
ppp setups that can be activated with /sbin/ifup and /sbin/ifdown.
I have found these to be much more reliable than wvdial, and I imagine
are more portable too.

ATM how I use dialup with gnome is to create a connection with the
redhat tools, then use the modem lights applet to activate it.

So here is a plan(of questionable quality):

1. We create a really simple dialer that scans the ppp configs and
allows you choose which one to dial from a list. Allows you to choose
username and password if possible. Then connects using ifup scripts and
monitors the connection in the notification area.

2. We look at making a portable connection creation wizard so that we
don't have to rely on disto specific tools. There are some command line
tools IIRC that we could look at.

I don't have a massive knowledge of ppp so I may be talking crap :)

Also, take a look at kppp, it may not be terribly pretty but it really
is a very good app, in my experience. For a long time I used it in gnome
because it was the only thing that worked. Although, i think it needs to
be run as root :(

We really need a dialer in gnome-network ! Hope that Darryl and others
might be inspired to some coding. If people are willing to commit to a
bit of coding then we can talk to the gnome-network maints and move this
discussion onto the desktop lists.

Happy Coding

-- 
                 .--= [ MArk Finlay - sisob ] =--.

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