Two weeks back I decided to switch to Ubuntu 13.04. I was using 12.04 LTS version and everything was fine. However I was seeing crash in bzr-gtk upon bzr gcommit and hence I decided to upgrade. All was well until I saw the sys-tray icon of Network Manager crash upon switching connections due to bug#1164631 and bug#1159063. I have to switch between connections often and this was frustrating.
The worst part of all this is that you cannot go online and find a solution to the issue since you are no longer connected to the internet. So much for our dependency on the Internet! And you cannot restart your system if you have a huge test suite being run.
Skimming through the man pages I came across the old friend, NMCLI
Okay, So this was the epiphany I was looking for, Cool! So what's next.
To connect copy the uuid or the name of the connection you want to connect to e.g. I wanted to connect to my cdma dongle and hence I used
This is cool but I wanted to switch the connection from the systray. I used Python appIndicator3 to create an appindicator and added a menu with the list of all the available connections.
Next was to register the appindcator to dbus notification interface. This will ensure that we get notifications of network connect or disconnect, whether from this appindicator or from outside.
The worst part of all this is that you cannot go online and find a solution to the issue since you are no longer connected to the internet. So much for our dependency on the Internet! And you cannot restart your system if you have a huge test suite being run.
Skimming through the man pages I came across the old friend, NMCLI
$ nmcli dev
DEVICE TYPE STATE ttyUSB0 cdma disconnected wlan0 802-11-wireless disconnected eth0 802-3-ethernet unavailable
Okay, So this was the epiphany I was looking for, Cool! So what's next.
$ nmcli con
NAME UUID TYPE TIMESTAMP-REAL VPN connection 1 de9fd222-7a27-4e29-ad9e-9095f953e837 vpn never LAN c26d0089-0f41-422a-9997-8a9b832d7159 802-3-ethernet Saturday 26 October 2013 07:23:48 PM IST Tata Indicom (Photon+) connection b3c0f820-7521-4eb4-8507-8c931f44d691 cdma Tuesday 29 October 2013 04:25:28 PM IST |
To connect copy the uuid or the name of the connection you want to connect to e.g. I wanted to connect to my cdma dongle and hence I used
$ nmcli con up uuid b3c0f820-7521-4eb4-8507-8c931f44d691
This is cool but I wanted to switch the connection from the systray. I used Python appIndicator3 to create an appindicator and added a menu with the list of all the available connections.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | from gi.repository import AppIndicator3 as appindicator def getIndicator(): indicator = appindicator.Indicator.new ( "Network-switcher", "indicator-messages", appindicator.IndicatorCategory.APPLICATION_STATUS) indicator.set_icon('/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-dark/status/24/gnome-netstatus-0-24.svg') indicator.set_status (appindicator.IndicatorStatus.ACTIVE) indicator.set_attention_icon('/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-dark/status/24/gnome-netstatus-75-100.svg') NSSignalHandler.registerSignalHandler(indicator) return indicator |
Next was to register the appindcator to dbus notification interface. This will ensure that we get notifications of network connect or disconnect, whether from this appindicator or from outside.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | from gi.repository import Gdk import dbus from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop def registerSignalHandler(ind): global indicator indicator= ind dbus_loop = DBusGMainLoop() system_bus = dbus.SystemBus(mainloop=dbus_loop) system_bus.add_signal_receiver(connection_handler, dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Connection.Active", signal_name="PropertiesChanged") Gdk.threads_init() |
From here everything was downhill :) I added a call back to check if the notification is a connect or a disconnect. You may get the active connection from
A screenshot of the systray icon.
It is a simple python script and is available on launchpad.
$ nmcli con status
NAME UUID launchpad DEVICES DEFAULT VPN MASTER-PATH Tata Indicom (Photon+) connection b3c0f820-7521-4eb4-8507-8c931f44d691 ttyUSB0 yes no -- |
A screenshot of the systray icon.
It is a simple python script and is available on launchpad.
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