connman-notify generates desktop notifications for connman events, such as interface connection/disconnection.
The generated notifications look like:
ethernet: online [10.1.0.5] ethernet: disconnected wifi/SSID: configuring ... wifi/SSID: online [192.168.0.1] ...
Simply run connman-notify at the start of your session:
./connman-notify &
Use connman-notify -h to see a minimal help. The command line flags -n and -l can be used to customize the detail level of the notification (to hide IPv4/6 addresses or show long connman interface names).
You'll need connman to be running of course, and you'll also need a notification daemon such as dunst.
If you're interested in desktop-environment agnostic network managers, connman is one of the few available along with WICD, netctl if you're using Arch linux, and dhcpcd (yes, dhcpcd can be also used as a simple network manager using dhcpcd-gtk).
If you're looking for a zero-configuration solution though, just use WICD. connman is not "user friendly" yet.
connman however blows WICD out of the water in terms of speed. It can bring an ethernet link up in 2 seconds (compared to ~10s of WICD) and perform an ethernet<=>WiFi switch in generally less than 3 seconds (WICD normally just fails to reconnect!). Not to mention minimal CPU/memory usage, built-in DHCP client, and good support for IPv6.
connman has no graphical management interface yet. connman-ui runs in the system tray (if you have one), but it's still far away to being complete.
connman_dmenu provides a simple dmenu-based WiFi network selector. For a tiled window-manager setup, the combination of connman-notify and connman_dmenu serves my current purposes nicely.
The following software is currently required for connman-notify:
- Python
- Pynotify (
python-notify) - Python DBUS (
python-dbus)
On Debian/Ubuntu, you can install all the required dependencies with:
sudo apt-get install python python-notify python-dbus