KNetworkLED 0.5.1 review

Here's a little app I threw together basically cause I wanted it

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Brent Kelly

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Here's a little app I threw together basically cause I wanted it. Being a guy who just left the Windows world about two years ago, I came to rely on the little network activity LED display in the systemtray to let me know if something was just taking a long time to transmit, or if the connection was just hung.

Now, I know there's a lot of these little apps all over the place, but there wasn't one for kde's system tray that I could find. Even if there were other ones that you could get to work in the systemtray, I'm a big fan of KDE's consistent look and its integration, so I decided I might as well make something I could use and learn the KDE/QT framework while I was at it.

Now, for the disclaimer: This is BETA stuff here. It works for me, I can't garantee anything. I made it with KDevelop, while learning KDevelop, while learning the KDE and QT api's, while being a neophyte C++ programmer.

Here are some key features of "KNetworkLED":
Current Features:

Docks into KDE system tray.
Has a configuration dialog from which you can select what network device to monitor (out of the ones you have available)and how often you want to poll that device for activity (100ms to 1000ms).
Tooltip popup when mouseovering the systemtray icon that displays what device is being monitored and how many TX/RX packets have been transmitted/recieved.

Known bugs:

It doesn't get the correct RT/TX values from /proc/net/dev because the columns for the numbers are different than the the title columns for a couple people people I've seen (don't know why their dev file is screwy). Its possible that it's the same for people with kernels other than 2.4.x or 2.6.x. If yours is different and you know what columns are what, the columns the program uses are simple defines that you can change before compiling. There's no install rule for the makefile.
I'd like it to detach from the console or whatever its run from, this is probably easy, but like I said, I'm a neophyte at this stuff.
I'm sure there's a few more...

What's New in This Release:
Poll Timer was not updating on the fly when user changed it.