Oh lord that was corny. Any ways, it isn’t about taking off and landing safely, but it is about saving some of that important Lithium Ion juice while you are in flight. That’s right, I have hacked together a little system tray applet that will allow you to enable or disable the power of your wireless devices such as WiFi and Bluetooth. In the future 3G support will (hopefully) be included as well as function key support, but since we are approaching a Feature Freeze with Karmic, we had to get something in right away, and then work out the kinks before release. At first it was designed to be used with the Kubuntu Netbook Edition which we are planning on providing a preview release for Karmic. Then after working on it, it seemed to work fine for laptops just as well. D’uh, it uses Wireless Tools and BlueZ, so of course it would work.

Right now it has only been tested with Dell hardware. I know for a fact it will not work with the Asus eeePC due to their silly wireless drivers. Because of that, I will probably end up either borrowing code from eee-controls or eee-applet or just using those and porting them for use in this applet.

As this project goes on, and updates are added, I will keep you informed. It will be put in the repos just as soon as it passes its packaging review.

And now for some pics:

KDE Airplane Mode with no devices (Tooltip)

KDE Aiplane Mode with devices (Tooltip)

KDE Airplane Mode with devices (Menu)

KDE Airplane Mode popup to enable/disable airplane mode

Note that this application is buggy and has been known to eat 2 children and the neighbors cat. What you see might not be what you get. There will definitely be some more changes and updates coming to the application as well as the GUI.