Knetwork manager is a critical piece of software which influences people's perceptions of KDE, Kubuntu and Linux in general. It has not work properly in any previous versions of KDE or Kubuntu and is again not working now in 8.10.

The GUI interface is a nightmare, the feedback of what it is doing is non-existent even if switched on in the options and it fails dismally on any notebook with 2 interfaces.

KDE4 is great and has great promise. It is far ahead of Vista and Gnome and even OSX for me. One can live with with most of the limited functionality but connecting to a dsl network (Dialup and PPPOE) is a real chore. Not to say anything trying a notebook wireless connection which is even worse.

I think the problem is that it is trying to do too much and it has no good development focus/lead.

Look at the function in Gnome with 8.10. It really just works.:-@:thumbs_down:

There is work ongoing on a NetworkManager Plasmoid. I'm not sure if it will make the cut for 4.2, as it's still in playground and the hard freeze approaches.

You may use nm-applet from Gnome in KDE. It works and can dock in KDE panel. I do not know how get rid of KNetworkManager - there are no menu item to disallow it. The same is for nm-applet.

alukin wrote:You may use nm-applet from Gnome in KDE. It works and can dock in KDE panel. I do not know how get rid of KNetworkManager - there are no menu item to disallow it. The same is for nm-applet.

Take a look into /etc/xdg/autostart

Thanks! Who was so smart to put this stuff in global /etc? Is Unix singleuser OS now?

OpenSUSE Developer Will Stephenson has recently put quite some work into a the networkmanager plasmoid.

Might even become available as a backport for distributions which do KDE 4.1 backports

Cheers,
_

Thanks for the good advise and comment that Will is working on this. This is really a a major cause of people moving away from KDE based apps when using notebooks. Really a shame. Will try and install NM-Gnome and give feedback.

Try Wicd, in my humble opinion it is the best network management tool bar none....

XiniX wrote:Try Wicd, in my humble opinion it is the best network management tool bar none....

I'm using Wicd as well. It's ugly and not as intuitive as it could be, but it works. It's a plain vanilla Python GTK+ app.

If the KDE4 port of KNetworkmanager doesn't get shipped with 4.2, chances are I'll just fetch it from SVN and compile it. Wicd may be good, but I'm trying to get rid of all GTK+ applications I have on my system.

hvralpha wrote:I think the problem is that it is trying to do too much and it has no good development focus/lead.

Look at the function in Gnome with 8.10. It really just works.:-@:thumbs_down:

I was just writing a long post about this - but then realized you are already saying it all

Just now I scraped knetworkmanager on a newly installed machine and installed nm-applet, because I got so used to its simplicity from my netbook. The difference is striking - I can't imagine that no one was ever annoyed enough by knetworkmanager's GUI to completely renew it. In the current version (with Kubuntu 8.10) there was even a huge step backward - no dynamic list of available WLANs in the context menu, the devices are named "ethX" in the menu etc. ... this machine is for my parents, for $DEITY's sake, I'm definitely not going to explain to them the device names of Linux' network interfaces, no sir
But even the older knetworkmanager that could do these things was much too complicated.

einar wrote:There is work ongoing on a NetworkManager Plasmoid. I'm not sure if it will make the cut for 4.2, as it's still in playground and the hard freeze approaches.

oH no. Not as an plasmoid?
Don't misunderstand: plasmoids/widgets/gadgets can be very useful and nice: some notes, weather forecast, upcoming events from my calendar and stuff like that are very fine for plasmoids.
But not thinks like a networkmanager!
I think plasmoids and dockapps (like knetworkmanager) follow two different objectives: the one (plasmoids) is stuff, that supports my work. so its fine that they are running on my desktop.
but the other is incidential "control stuff", like kwallet, klipper or even knetworkmanager: i don't want to see them, until i have to do something with them (switch network-link, close wallet [..]).

Maybe i misunderstood something there with the functionality and aims of plasmoids in kde4, but i think this new nice feature should be used deliberately...
Not everything should be realized as a plasmoids, because its possible.

Yes, you misunderstood something.. ,-)
"Plasmoid" is only a technical phrase: everything in plasma is a plasmoid, be it a panel, be it a funny widget or the desktop itself. The big question is how to organize all those plasmoids so that on one hand they don't disturb the user, and on the other hand are always available when needed. Somewhere in this forum is a discussion about "killing" the systray, I think it was this one: windows-7-ui-first ... 001-3.html

okay.
so... mea culpa

This is how it currently looks like. Those containers of the list of wireless networks are plasmoids but they olny show up when you click the icon. But if you wish, you can place them on your desktop so that they are always visible.