[Kde-hardware-devel] Review Request: Adds tab with Mobile Broadband info (depends on ModemManager)

[Lamarque Vieira Souza]

	Ok, now plasma applet connects me to the Internet with all three types 
(wired, wireless and 3G), but it needs a lot of work:

. auto-connect works for wired and wireless, but for 3G it only works if the 
modem has already been "initialized" (radio turned on and registered to 
operator network). 3G modems can be slow to initialize (my MD300 can take 15 
seconds to turn radio on after I hook it up to USB port plus more 15s to 
register to operator network, sometimes even more than that). It seems plasma 
applet does not wait for it to initialize and auto-connect does not work. To 
force it to connect I had to disable networking, which disconnects wired and 
wireless connections, and enable networking again.

. some time ago I did a test with wvdial with my cell phone and if I issue the 
AT +CFUN=1 command (turn radio on) it does the contrary, it disables radio and 
I have to reboot my phone to get it working again, even for voice call. 
ModemManager always issue this command when connecting, that is another reason 
I do not use auto-connect for 3G here, so please make it possible to connect 
manually or I will have to reboot my cell phone everytime I hook it to my 
notebook.

. connecting manually is very important to me because I have a 3G modem and a 
cell phone, both using chips from the same operator, I do it this way because 
voice call using 3G chip is much more expensive than using the other chip 
(about more than 8 times more expensive, one more wierd thing about brazilian 
telephone operators). So, if I hook up my cell phone plasma applet will 
automatically connects me to 3G and my cell phone bill will increase like hell 
until I notice it. Ok it will not because the problem mentioned before, but if 
that problem did not existed this one would happen. The problem below makes 
things a little worse since plasma applet does not notifies me I am connected.

. plasma applet does not emmit any notification at all as far as I can see. 
There are entries in bugs.kde.org with people asking for notifications when a 
connection has been made or closed (https://bugs.kde.org/204356). I 
implemented this feature some weeks ago for knm and I think it is quite 
useful.

. when NM restarts the applet does not recognise NM anymore, but the kded 
modules still works and auto-connects in background. Knm has this problem too 
and as far as I could investigate this problem (https://bugs.kde.org/233469) 
some dbus signals are not reaching the slots. I created a hack to restart knm 
and it seems to workaround the problem in knm, but I do not know how to 
restart plasma applet. I think this is a annyoing bug, if someone could help 
investigate this or make my hack work with plasma applet I appreciate it. As a 
test I tried to remove and re-add plasma applet from notification tray but it 
still does not recognise NM is running. Even removing the whole notification 
tray did not do the trick.

. there are some inconsistencies in the interface. The "Not Available" entry 
below the Mobile Broadband interface for instance, when I click on it it just 
show me the details about the last connection I had clicked (eth0, eth1, or 
usb0 in my case), if it is "not available" it should do nothing when I click 
on in, right? The "Show more"  button does nothing here.

Em Terça-feira 18 Maio 2010, Sebastian Kügler escreveu:
> Hi Lamarque,
> 
> On Tuesday 18 May 2010 20:21:31 Lamarque Vieira Souza wrote:
> > 	I have never got the plasmoid to work here after KDE SC 4.2.x, so I am
> > 
> > using the monolithic version since then. If you help me make it work here
> > I can start making changes on it, as long as it does not involve using
> > trunk kdelibs, I prefer to keep using kdelibs 4.4.3.
> 
> Sure, let's try to make it work :)
> 
> I've kept backwards compatibility to 4.4, so that should be OK.
> 
> > 	When I enable the plasmoid here it does not react to any network
> > 
> > interface (wired ethernet, wireless or 3G). As far as I remember there is
> > no error message in .xsession-errors too.
> 
> I've explained some thing on:
> http://vizzzion.org/blog/2010/02/tokamak-iv-network-management/
> 
> especially the part about the kded module could be the cause of your issue,
> so try:
> 
> qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement
> 
> (when knetworkmanager is not running).
> 
> > 	I would like to have the plasmoid working here to use the network
> > 	traffic
> > 
> > monitor you showed in your blog
> > (http://vizzzion.org/blog/2010/05/blog-back- online/). That is one of the
> > things I miss in knm. For people who use 3G it is very important to count
> > the traffic to know if they have reached their data limit. It would be
> > great if the monitor could salve the traffic data to calculate the amount
> > of data transferred during one month, like
> > kppp/kppplogview do. One thing I miss in kppplogview is that it always
> > starts couting at the first day of month, but the bill operator's cycle
> > can start at any day of the month.
> > 
> > 	I will try again to make the plasmoid work here. If I am successfull I
> > 
> > will start to make my ModemManager changes on it.
> 
> Awesome :-)


-- 
Lamarque V. Souza
http://www.geographicguide.com/brazil.htm
Linux User #57137 - http://counter.li.org/
http://www.kde-mg.org