So. Recently I blogged about Network status aware apps, and some time later, I got asked by a developer “How do I see if I’m online if I’m not using network manager?” and I replied with some dbus commands and he shook his head in despair. So, I ended up writing a small plasma widget targetting developers and very powerusers that can tell you the current state of the network and offers to add yet another ‘manual’ datapoint to the network status.
So. In line with another blog post of mine about getting the small utilities we all write and just let stay in a drawer (or somewhere in ~ on a local computer), I’m announcing it’s existance. That application became famous and even mentioned in Linux Weekly News, but I don’t expect that here. But anyways, here it is: http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch/sune/networkstatus.git.
And a picture of it, it is not pretty but well, it’s a tool mostly for developers, not for end users.
Have fun, and I hope to see more of these small projects from various people.
Does that only check of an existing connection or whether you actually can access something?
WiFi with a hotspot web login interface is quite common nowadays, so it is highly useful for such tools to try to download a know small web page and check if its contents match what was expected. And if not – have an option of launching a web browser to allow the user to log in and then display the connected status when the connection actually is working.
This is just a visualisation of the data retrieved from Solid. Solid gets its data from various data providers, depending on your configuration from networkmanager, connman, wicd or the linux kernel itself.
Network manager itself should provide an indicator icon to show if the pc is actually connect to the internet or not. Windows can do this since years.
And what if you aren’t using networkmanager nor aren’t on windows?