Bluetooth NAP tethering support in KDE Plasma NM

Recently, Plasma Network Management applet gained ability for bluetooth tethering. The initial support was only for DUN (Dial Up Networking), but not for PAN (Personal Area Network) or NAP (Network Access Point).

Sat a whole day staring at KDE networkmanagement code and GNOME network-manager-applet to figure out how to extend this to NAP (my phone seems to support that); and with help of Lamarque, a few lines of code did the job.

The patch to implement this is under review. It has had only limited testing from my end. Note that this will work only if you have applied patch for Solid to support bluetooth devices in kdebase-workspace. I’ve updated the kde-plasma-networkmanagement and kdebase-workspace RPMS and uploaded here. Binary RPMs are only for x86_64; for other architectures, rebuild the SRPMs. If there are brave souls out there to test it out, here’s the procedure:

1. Update kdebase-workspace with the above ones
2. Update kde-plasma-networkmanagement*
3. Run “/usr/libexec/kde4/networkmanagement_configshell create --type bluetooth --specific-args "A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 nap“. Replace A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 with the hardware address of your bluetooth device (can be found out easily from BlueDevil).
4. That’s it, the connection should automatically be set up and appear in Plasma NM.

Update: The patch is upstream. Lamarque has adapted and integrated it.

ExMan 0.5 released

I’ve just released ExMan 0.5. Actually, the code was in git master for quite some time now, but I got around of building RPMs only today. The source tar ball and RPMs are available at the usual Sourceforge.net download space.

Most notable changes are:

• ExMan now conforms to XDG specification for storing data. Which means, the backend data files is now stored in $HOME/.local/share/data/ExManFile.txt instead of $HOME/.ExManFile.txt. The Qt API QDesktopServices::DataLocation provides platform/operating system agnostic location, so this works fine on GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
• The old data file is automatically migrated to the new location so that you don’t have to manually do anything.

ExMan now available for MacOS X

Couple of days ago a mail from Softpedia Editorial Team greeted me with the surprising news that ExMan is now included in the Softpedia Mac software database.

They have reviewed, audited for malwares/spywares, built and tested ExMan. See http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Finance/ExMan.shtml. They have also provided some nice screenshots of ExMan running on Mac – everybody loves screenshots and here’s one of them: