I recently upgraded from Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) to Intrepid Ibex (8.10) but I was certain that the old pppd configuration I had for just this situation must have survived the upgrade. It was painstakingly put together from searches conducted over GPRS with Opera Mini on the self-same phone I wanted to connect with in a situation not unlike the one I found myself in – removed from all semblances of civilization (i.e. cabled broadband).

Just for fun I decided to check if there were any significant changes to nm-applet (or NetworkManagement Applet). There hadn’t really been any changes to it worth writing home about in the last 3 versions of Ubuntu (at least) but for some reason a force, perhaps even the Force (the one without midi-chlorients), reached out from within the Ether(net) and compelled me to right click on the applet icon and click “Edit Connections…”

And lo the clouds parted, choirs chanted, and a beam of white light shone upon the lowly notebook (specs to come later). Or the light shone upon the roof that protected the notebook from the wonderful summer rain falling outside at least.

For the Network Connections dialog had indeed evolved, nay mutated. Here we gazed upon the new “Mobile Broadband” tab (though this connection is anything but broad) and all was at once well with the ‘Tubes. For from within this tab one could click ‘Add’ and a pretty clickety-click Wizard adorned the desktop. And with the simple selection of country and service provider, alteration of the arbitrary contents of a descriptive text box, and the click of an ‘Apply’ button a connection capable of making use of a GSM modem was created.

But surely it couldn’t be that simple? Where do you tell it which modem device to use? Upon connecting the phone to the notebook all was revealed… nm-applet now automatically discovered modem devices. Connecting was as simple as clicking the correct radio button in the left-click drop-down menu of nm-applet. I could cry.

A part of me is sad that another aspect of Linux’s divine complexity has gone the same route as the ill-supported wireless networking drivers. Whatever will the geeks of tomorrow do to get their kicks from computing? Imagine your children never having to ever compile their own kernel? My blood runs cold. And yet I’m joyed that the illustrious Mark Shuttleworth (or his team at Canonical and the brave me and women of the Ubuntu community to be exact) has brought Linux yet another step closer to the mass market.

Screenshots and more to follow upon my return to the arms of DSL, my mistress. Apologies for the current lack of bling but this post is being written from an old laptop running Ubuntu, connected to the Internet via a Sony Ericsson W850i which is paying premium rates for bandwidth.