cnetworkmanager 0.7.1

Cnetworkmanager is a command-line client for NetworkManager, intended to supplement and replace the GUI applets. So far it is a single python script. What is new in version 0.7.1:

• it does not need a configuration file anymore:
  cnetworkmanager -C publicnet
cnetworkmanager -C myessid --wep-hex 112234445566778899aabbccdd
cnetworkmanager -C another --wpa-psk-hex \
 112233445566778899aabbccddeeff00112233445566778899aabbccddeeff00
• it works with NM 0.6 (tested on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy and a pre-release OLPC) in addition to the older support for NM 0.7pre (tested on openSUSE 11.0)
  

What is still left to do:

• sooner:
• specifying the key as a non-hex passphrase
• reading the configuration stored by the GNOME nm-applet
• possibility to quit after a connection is established
• later:
• more encryption schemes (WPA2?)
• more connection types (dial-up, VPN)

Cultural Exchange 4: First YaST

Managed to compile and run YaST up to nfs-client and ntp-client. Of course it does not work properly, but makes for a nice Potemkin hamlet.

Fresh libzypp needs cmake 2.6 but there is only 2.4 in .debs. Fortunately the cmake authors provide a binary tarball with 2.6, only one has to know where to put the contained directories.

Notes for clean-up: Libzypp should say it needs hal-storage and boost-filesystem too. Python-bindings should check for python-dev, should use python-config. Perl does not seem to respect vendor_arch for ycp.pm?

Cultural Exchange 3: First .deb

Started to build YaST. Managed to compile yast2-core. Now going to make it repeatable by properly packaging the dependencies. The first one is blocxx. Bleeding edge stuff is in the Build Service: home:mvidner:debian. The post How to make debian standard debs from scratch was much helpful.

Tried to print and failed miserably. The setup tool would not work with a remote CUPS printer, kept asking for my password. Switching AppArmor from enforcement to complain mode did not help, nor did disabling it.

The development package for openssl is libssl-dev (openSUSE: libopenssl-devel). http://packages.debian.org/ helps with that.

Perl packages, named perl-Foo-Bar on openSUSE, are usually named libfoo-bar-perl on Debian.

Packaging system started to complain that packages cannot be verified.

(Cultural Exchange is my long term project of working with Ubuntu instead of openSUSE. TODO: make a permanent index page.)

YaST Workshop 2008

We had the annual YaST workshop last week. The people in the team boldly went to explore new APIs and one of the results is experimental integration of PolicyKit into YaST. If you really want to break your system, you can try the current code.