Solaris' Network Auto Magic (NWAM) project

Colin recently posted about OpenSolaris' Network Manager-type program (aka NetWork Auto Magic = NWAM).

It is true to say that initially NWAM was focused on the system-level configuration for much of it's time, since this project is only one part of a major rework of how to configure the network on OpenSolaris - with our without a desktop presence - moving everything from files in /etc/ into the Service Management Framework (SMF) - due to this NWAM needs to be able to support not just the simple WiFi versus Wired configuration, but also things like tunneling, link aggregation, etc.

The links that you pointed to were respect ot NWAM Phase 0 which isn't even the default configuration mechanism yet, except if you install using the Solaris Developer Express 2, and was only integrated to make some of the network configuration of these releases a little easier handling the very specific case of 1 WiFi and maybe 1 Wireless NIC in the system only, using DHCP. As for the UI - the use Zenity to pass messages to a user on the desktop, asking for WEP keys, or for the user to pick a WiFi network to connect to. But as I said, this was Phase 0 (Zero), there is a lot more to come...

It is not true to say that they have not considered the desktop - Phase 1 attempts to address that area - there have been many (at least 10 at this stage) iterations of UI design work. Initially we started with a major application to configure everything in NWAM, which went through a lot of UI Design by our User Interface Design people (in a group called xDesign) to make it usable, and then we in the Solaris Desktop/GNOME group were asked to look at it.

After more re-work, we decided that the original design was just too complex of anyone but a person with significant network knowledge to easily use, and as such didn't really "fit" into the desktop all that well. So we under took even more effort to reduce this UI to better reflect the needs of the average user (later phases will expand to allow for even more complex configuration, but hopefully in a way that doesn't damage the current design). This was undertaken with Calum Benson as main UI designer.

The latest UI design for Phase 1 can be found at: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam/UIDesign/Phase1/

Even from the outset, the UI was noted as important - and always was mentioned in the storyboards and UI Design pages - please look at the links that are expanded in the menu on the left at http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam/UIDesign/ to see more...