Bugzilla – Bug 130370
GNOME modemlights applet missing
Last modified: 2006-01-03 12:35:10 UTC
The GNOME modemlights applet is missing from the gnome-applets package. With the upstream release of gnome-applets 2.9.4, it was changed to depend on gnome-system-tools, but neither Fedora nor SuSE ship gnome-system-tools. The result is that the new applet is not built and that no modemlights applet is packaged at all. Upstream changelog entry: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-applets/2.9/gnome-applets-2.9.4.changes "2005-01-07 Davyd Madeley <davyd@madeley.id.au> * configure.in: Support for new modemlights (requires gnome-system-tools to build). * modemlights/*: Out with the old, in with the new." This is not optimal because this applet is very useful for modem and ISDN users. I'll attach a proposed spec file to build the old applet as a separate package. Additionally, there might be a different approach to restore the old applet in the main package by simply copying the old files over the new ones and undoing the changes in configure.in - Fedora does it like this. I don't know whether this should be a bug or an enhancement, so I'm marking it as a bug because there is currently less functionality than in the version of GNOME distributed with previous SuSE releases.
Created attachment 55269 [details] proposed spec file
Actually, we do ship gnome-system-tools but it really doesn't work that well.
Yes, gnome-system-tools is indeed included, but the applet is still not built because gnome-system-tools is not mentioned in BuildRequires, and even if it were, it would introduce a run-time requirement to gnome-system-tools. The old applet is not "optimal" either because it requires the user to know or to find out the command line for connecting and disconnecting, but it's still better than nothing because the kinternet/qinternet package is not installed with the default GNOME selection, and dial-on-demand is not the best thing to do for ISDN and modem users.
Robert, shouldn't NetworkManager handle this now?
NM does not show modem lights, no.
Was not clear enough - the main bug is actually that there is no easy way to switch to a ppp connection in GNOME. I believe this to be solved in NM now.
Oh, yes. Highly misleading bug summary, then. ;-) NM resolves.
Related bug 141130.
Fixed build of modemlights applet for EDGE/10.1/supplementary (missing system-tools-backends in build environment).