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

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

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

  Luis