Idea of my GSoC '09 Project : Making Gnome desktop location aware

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 8:09 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 7:07 PM, Craig Andrews
> <candrews at integralblue.com> wrote:
>>> This is definitely interesting. One potential issue though (and I can be
>>> mistaken), is that it seems that this is more like a bunch of small
>>> patches in many different modules. So be careful to explain the benefits
>>> of all this when writing your application. And maybe find more related
>>> things to do based on geoclue: the task as described seems to be a bit
>>> too small.
>> Epiphany would also benefit from geoclue in terms of HTML 5 location
>> awareness.
>>
>> Two others apps (that are not gnome) that would benefit from geoclue are
>> Firefox 3.1/3.5 as an HTML 5 geolocation provider, and Pidgin as a XEP-80
>> provider (similar to what Empathy has done).
>
> The Linux kernel's new wireless regulatory infrastructure would also
> benefit and we can even use it to enhance roaming. We've actually put
> an entry for this specific idea as part of Linux Foundation's GSoC
> (Google Summer of Code) for 2009. It may be worth merging the two GSoC
> project ideas as it seems there quite a few component which would
> benefit, including now the kernel. The components relating to wireless
> would be any gnome based wireless configuration manager (like Network
> Manager, connman or wicd), once these become location-aware they can
> then communicate to the kernel the country the user is in
> automatically, using wpa_supplicant which supports the country
> selection settings (country=US for example in your dynamically
> generated foo.conf). Having this information centrally as part of
> GNOME would beat having each application export a location interface
> to geoclue. Eventually we can also enhance wireless roaming by keeping
> record of APs based on position so we can always prefer the closest
> and most recently seen AP.
>
> https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009#802.11_Wireless

I'll add that we also only have mostly kernel mentors, GNOME mentors
would be good but since it seems a simiilar GSoC was written for the
GNOME project this can go hand in hand. That how about -- Linux
Foundation can mentor the kernel part of the GeoClue GSoC and GNOME
would mentor with the integration on the desktop?

  Luis