Holger's Blog

So there has been Hackweek at SUSE/Novell the last week and I'm finally finding the time to release a new version of killswitch-applet. This time, it's version 0.2.3, and really a lot has changed from the previous 0.1 release:

• The applet remembers your settings across reboots

  That is actually the feature which makes you want killswitch-applet at all. Without the applet, whenever you disable a device, let's say bluetooth, after a reboot, the device is active again. I'm assuming two prerequisites here:

  1. You're not using a Thinkpad laptop, because those are the only ones I know of (please enlighten me if you know of others) which are able to store the state of their devices in NVRAM. Speficically, the thinkpad-acpi driver is able to do so.
  2. Your laptop doesn't have a physical hardware switch for enabling/disabling bluetooth/wifi. This hardware switch might also be hidden after a usual button which doesn't look like it is handled in hardware.

  All other laptop owners might find killswitch-applet very useful. If you're the owner of let's say, a sony, HP, Acer, or whatever laptop, you would have to disable the bluetooth device over and over again after each reboot. Maybe even after a sleep, depending on the hardware configuration, distribution, kernel version, etc.. These unnecessary mouse clicks are just avoided. Disabling the bluetooth device once will take care that it is disabled the next time killswitch-applet starts, which is mostly when you're doing a reboot and/or logging in to your desktop.

• Vector graphic (svg) is used for the tray icon, which makes it scale nicely for whatever panel (kicker, gnome-applet, etc.) you're using.
• Add tool tip to get a fast overview about which killswitches are active.