3g/dialup usability

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 13:18 -0500, Carlos Romero wrote:
> Is anybody still using the gnome modem lights applet for connecting
> and monitoring?
> the functionality seems to have been replaced by NetworkManager and
> the system monitor applet for a while now.
> Although I have never initiated a modem connection with NM, It's been
> so long that I forgot what the handshake sounded like.
> On a side note the monitor applet is not showing network activity but
> the application is, at least with 3g.

For now, nm-applet doesn't have modem-lights support.  Partially that's
because the icon area is used for a lot of other stuff like signal
strength display too.  So especially for 3G modems, the current
modemlights icons just wouldn't work in combination with signal
strength.  If you want the modem lights stuff, the best option is to run
both modem-lights and nm-applet for now.

An open bug (and something trivial to implement, if somebody wants to
I'm happy to explain how it should be done) is to track data transfer
totals for 3G devices in nm-applet.  NetworkManager already emits
signals on D-Bus for how much data the PPP interface has used; the
applet simply needs to listen for those and keep a running total in the
connection object in GConf, then have a "Reset Totals" button somewhere
in the connection editor for it.

Dan