HAL purge
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.