Support for ADSL modems

[Pantelis Koukousoulas <pktoss gmail com>]

Hi,

I just wanted to announce that I 'm going to be working on adding
support for ADSL
modems in NetworkManager for a while, as a nice project to learn NM
internals and
in order to finish what we started 2 years ago at Chania LUG's "coding camp".
It also makes NetworkManager more complete (and if support for old dialup modems
is also added some time in the future by whatever means, NetworkManager can
finally become Linux "one stop shop" for client-side network
configuration, at least
for me).

Why ADSL modem support is useful?
Users have requested it (e.g.,
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/3853/) and it is also
among the items in NM TODO file.

What are you going to work on?
The initial effort will be for the only related device I already have
(Sagem FAST 800,
a USB ADSL modem) and PPPoA, I hope that PCI ADSL devices and PPPoE will
be supported as well in the future. I know that there is already some
PPPoE support,
it just remains to be seen if it can be reused mostly as-is by using the nas0
interface one gets from br2684 as just another ordinary ethernet device.

Initially I 'm going to work in NetworkManager and nm-applet. KDE support can be
written by someone else with my help, or I can write it myself as well
in the future.


Existing work
I have found https://github.com/hicham-haouari/NetworkManager-ADSL-Support
that has some initial libnm-util work (NMSettingAdsl), unfortunately
only after I
implemented this myself as well ( :/ ) so I will try to merge the 2 versions.

There is also http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/ADSL which I 'm using
as reference wrt suggested class names etc.

Is there any other documentation or preliminary implementation? Is anyone else
working on this so that we can collaborate?


Code
My initial experiments are implemented on top of whatever version of
NetworkManager
(0.8.x) is in ubuntu maverick since this made it possible to not care
at all about build
dependencies etc.

Are current git tips of NetworkManager/nm-applet stable enough to do the actual
development on, or are they in a  "turbulence state" right now?

Are there instructions for how to install the git versions of
NetworkManager/nm-applet
in parallel with the system-provided ones (e.g., under /opt) so that
one can experiment
with them without breaking existing networking functionality? (I will
try to do this myself
anyway, just asking in case I can save the 15 minutes required :P)


Cheers,
Pantelis