[Utopia] Utopia stack and "removable networks"

[Johan Bilien <jobi via ecp fr>]

Hi all,

lately I've been observing how Windows XP handles network interfaces,
and I must say I'm quite amazed. The wireless network selection tool is
just what I'd like. When connecting to a 802.1X network, the user just
gets a notification, and if necessary gets a popup asking for the
username and password. Overall, everything just works.

If the handling of removable devices is now at least as good, if not
better on Linux, the free UNIX are still quite far behind when it comes
to configuration of "removable networks". However I believe that the
hotplug/hal/dbus stack provides the tools to do something at least as
good.

Is there some work going on on this? If we take 802.1X authentication,
what would be the correct way to do it? Should a bunch of users be given
the right to authenticate themselves to the network? If so, I suppose
those users should run a session-life-time daemon, kind of
gnome-network-manager, or maybe a user-owned instance of dbus? But if
several users are allowed to give a username/password for 1X
authentication, and if several are connected, who should be asked?

Thanks,
Johan.