Patrick’s Blog(2)

Fedora 12 will come with another cool new feature: poly instantiated tmp directories. Read more here.

Dan Williams of NetworkManager fame wrote on his blog that NetworkManager no longer requires HAL. The HAL website says HAL is in maintenance mode with development focus shifted to DeviceKit and other libs/apps. Seems HAL is on its way out.

What’s more important to me are the new features that are in the pipeline. Things like ModemManager, System-wide Configuration and IPv6 are great steps forward and will make networking in Gnome even more pain-free than it already is.

I also hope that the GUI of the NetworkManager applet will get some TLC. It doesn’t make sense to have a 50 item list of detected Wireless networks with the one I’m using hidden in there. The long list of detected Wireless networks makes it also too elaborate to get to the VPN Connections menu as you have to scroll all the way down. I hope to see a revamped GUI where the Wired and/or Wireless and/or VPN Connection in-use are at the top with a collapsed list of VPN Connections and detected Wireless networks below that.

Seems Drivel finally bit the dust with its removal from the Fedora repos. I did like Drivel when it worked. Alas, parting is such sweet sorrow. So Lekhonee to the rescue. I read about it before but thought it was a KDE app which is no good to me. Fortunately I was wrong as there is a Gnome version. So I installed it with a simple “yum install lekhonee-gnome” and it seems to work as advertised. Nice one Kushal!

If you want to enable the fingerprint reader in Fedora 11 then do this:

# yum install fprint* libfprint* gdm-plugin-fingerprint

You can find more information on the wiki.