Entries tagged "gnome".
A recent trip to Switzerland made me dig out my prepaid card for UMTS usage again. This resulted in some minor enhancements for Prepaid Manager. The new release handles disabled and missing modems more reliably. It also has some visual feedback if we know the length of the top up code:
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The slides of my talk about GNOME3 at the FroSCon 2011 in Sankt Augustin are now available. The source code including the examples can be found here:
git clone git://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/talks/2011-08-gnome3-froscon.git
It was a great conference that I really enjoyed being at. Thanks a lot to all who made that event possible and happen!
The new release switches to GDBus and adds an application icon. Together with the recently released Modem Manager 0.5 it's now able to fetch the balance information via USSD on Huawei and ZTE modems as well.
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I've made a first release of GNOME Prepaid Manager a couple of days ago after switching to GTK+3, GSettings and PyGObject's GObject introspection but it still wasn't that useful since the very common Huawei chipsets (present in many UMTS USB sticks) weren't working due to some missing code in ModemManager.
Thanks to Dan's great description I just got around to add that which should make ppm useful to more people.
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Thanks to Dan merging my changes into mobile-broadband-provider-info and ModemManager the prepaid-manager applet now doesn't need any external dependencies patched which is great news. However I still didn't get around to make it work on the very common Huawei 3G chipsets though. Once this is done the ui needs a lift up badly.
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Hello Planet GNOME! As of 2.91.91 krb5-auth-dialog should be fairly usable in GNOME3. The status icon is gone if the notification service supports persistence, we migrated to GDBus and to the new Control Panel.
The move to DConf is still missing though.
During a trip to Switzerland I needed some internet connectivity for my laptop and so I got myself a prepaid UMTS SIM card. That's a lot cheaper than roaming with the UMTS card from my local provider. NetworkManager worked great: after putting the SIM card into the laptop a dialog popped up asking for the PIN, then selecting the provider, ready to go!
After I used up my prepaid credit things got a bit more rough. The connection was failing for now "obvious" reason. So I put the SIM card into a mobile phone, pulled out the manual that came with the SIM card, found how to check the balance and dialed:
*130#
and the mobile phone returned that I didn't have enough credit left. So I got myself a top up code from the next supermarket, dialed:
*130*<topupcode>#
put the card back into my laptop and could connect again.
That's a bit cumbersome to repeat since you not only have to know the above USSD sequences (those vary between providers) but also need a mobile phone to put the SIM card into. So I added prelimanary USSD support to ModemManager, extended mobile-broadband-provider to support balance top-up information and hacked together a simple prepaid-manager-applet that allows you to check and top-up your prepaid balance right from your GNOME desktop. This needs more work (and a nice icon) but it's basically usable.
In case somebody else wants to jhbuild current GNOME 3 prereleases on Debian here's the current set of dependencies and the jhbuildrc I'm using. With the necessary fixes applied upstream now this allows me to build gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and others via
jhbuild build <program>
It needs libmozjs3d-dev from experimental for the shell but the rest comes out of squeeze.
Those old school ones among us that still need a printer who are new school enough to want to get rid of HAL should try system-config-printer from experimental. After replacing hal-cups-utils by system-config-printer-udev aptitude tells me:
The following packages will be REMOVED:
hal{u} hal-info{u}
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 2 to remove and 121 not upgraded.
Which means faster startup times and one daemon less on Squeeze's GNOME desktop. The new version also uses PolicyKit instead of gksu for finer grained permission control.
I've just added a simple afs plugin to krb5-auth-dialog. It just calls either aklog or afslog after acquiring or renewing your Kerberos ticket to get you into your AFS cell. To activate it use
gconftool-2 --set --list-type=string --type=list /apps/krb5-auth-dialog/plugins/enabled [afs]
and restart krb5-auth-dialog. A package with the above enabled has been uploaded to Debian. Thanks to the test account in the global2000.at cell provided by Jörg Herzinger I could test this easily and I have to say that AFS looks like a cool thing.
Krb5-auth-dialog now sends DBus signals when you acquire or renew your Kerberos ticket granting ticket and when the ticket expires. When using OpenAFS This can e.g. be used to trigger a call to aklog on ticket renewal. It's simple to catch the DBus signals from a Python script:
import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
bus.add_signal_receiver(tgt_renewed_handler, dbus_interface = "org.gnome.KrbAuthDialog", signal_name = "krb_tgt_renewed")
bus.add_signal_receiver(tgt_acquired_handler, dbus_interface = "org.gnome.KrbAuthDialog", signal_name = "krb_tgt_acquired")
bus.add_signal_receiver(tgt_expired_handler, dbus_interface = "org.gnome.KrbAuthDialog", signal_name = "krb_tgt_expired")
The tgt_*_handler will then be called when the signal is received. The shipped Python example allows to execute a script already:
tgt-signals.py -q --acquired-action=aklog --renewed-action=aklog
Krb5-auth-dialog also got a plugin system so you could use a loadable module for these kind of things instead. It already ships a PAM plugin that can be used to run some typical actions like calling pam-afs-session or getting kx509 set up.
You need to tell krb5-auth-dialog which plugins to load via gconf. To load the dummy and PAM plugins use:
gconftool-2 --set --list-type=string --type=list /apps/krb5-auth-dialog/plugins/enabled [pam,dummy]
Since I'm not using AFS or kx509 myself I'd be interested to know if this works out as expected.
If you want to write your one plugins you can use the dummy plugin as a basis.
A package with the above enabled has been uploaded to Debian experimental.
gnome-activity-journal recently entered Debian and it could become a great tool to keep track of hacking activities. The underlying zeitgeist can log these and other events and make the information available via DBus. I couldn't find a data provider that feeds the information about Git commits to it so I wrote a simple post commit hook. This way one can easily see when one worked on a source repository:
Now is there a nice way to store additional information like current branch or commit message along with that?
I've finally added basic Negotiate (Kerberos) support to libsoup. Git is available here. Using:
git clone http://git.debian.org/?p=users/agx/libsoup.git;a=summary
./autogen.sh
make
# for nautilus:
killall gvfsd
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=libsoup/.libs/ gvfsd
# epiphany:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=libsoup/.libs/ epiphany
# totem:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=libsoup/.libs/ totem
you can protect your music, files, whatever on a webserver using mod_auth_kerb and access them without storing a passwort just using your Kerberos ticket. Would be nice to get this merged #587145.
Besides quiet some bug fixes krb5-auth-dialog 0.13 now features a ticket dialog that lists your current tickets.
