need a setting to activate wifi hotspot

[Julia Palandri]

It would be great to have a setting where you can configure your phone as a mobile wifi hotspot

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking#cellular-mobile>: "'Hotspot' should navigate to the 'Hotspot' screen.

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking#hotspot>: "In the System Settings 'Cellular' screen, the “Hotspot” item should have value 'Off' or 'On'..."

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking#flight-mode>: "When you turn on Flight Mode: ... If you have a hotspot running, an alert should appear, “Turning on Flight Mode will disconnect any device connected to your hotspot.”..."

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Not quite finished, but enough to start implementation: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking#hotspot

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Specification updated. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking?action=diff&rev2=193&rev1=191>

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This doesn't involve any changes to the network menu, except that the "Wi-Fi" switch in the menu, like its other two manifestations, should say "Wi-Fi used for hotspot" whenever that's the case. So probably that menu item should be a shared component to ensure that it behaves exactly the same everywhere.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking?action=diff&rev2=194&rev1=193>

[Jussi Pakkanen (jpakkane)]

The design has two pages, one for toggling and one for settings. Would it be possible to consolidate them onto one page? It could look something like this:

toggle switch
text field
wifi name entry box
password entry box
password visible switch

Then we could make it so that you can't turn the hotspot on until both network name and password are filled in and possibly even make it impossible to edit the text boxes while the hotspot is enabled.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Yes, that would be possible. But I think specifying hotspot details without it turning on as a result, and not being able to change them while it was turned on, would both be a bit surprising.

It would also mean two presentations, and perhaps two implementations, of all the design and validation details for different network types. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking#wi-fi-authentication-variations> For example, that the Start/Change button "should be insensitive whenever the 'Key:' field contains fewer than 8 characters, more than 64 characters, or exactly 64 characters where any of them are not hexadecimal". This doesn't seem so bad now, while we allow only WEP, WPA Personal, or open hotspots. But the duplication would get steadily worse the more possibilities we offered.

That's why I say the same dialog should be used everywhere: For connecting to an encrypted broadcast network, for "Connect to Other Network", for "Network Details" for a previous network, and for "Set Up Hotspot"/"Change Hotspot Setup". In the last three cases, only the title and buttons should change.

Your question did make me realize I omitted the titles for the dialog. Fixed. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking?action=diff&rev2=196&rev1=195>

[Jussi Pakkanen (jpakkane)]

> But I think specifying hotspot details without it turning on as a result,
> and not being able to change them while it was turned on, would both
> be a bit surprising.

Why would that be surprising? That is exactly how one would expect it to work, especially the latter one. Being able to edit the settings while the hotspot is on is disconcerting because you could not tell whether the changes you have typed have taken hold or not. I would assume people would toggle the hotspot on and off just to make sure of it.

> This doesn't seem so bad now, while we allow only WEP, WPA Personal, or open hotspots.

We really should not be offering any other hotspot types than WPA. Devices that can't do WPA are extremely rare these days. In comparison both the iPhone and Jolla phones only allow you to set up a WPA hotspot. The two main reasons for this are:

- makes implementing the functionality massively simpler
- unencrypted and WEP connections are a major security problem

We should be (and indeed are) able to connect to open and WEP networks but we should not be setting them up ourselves.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

You're right, we definitely shouldn't let people set up a WEP hotspot (don't know what I was thinking there!), and probably shouldn't let people set up an open hotspot. So it's only the WPA Personal key subtleties that should be in sync between starting a hotspot, changing a hotspot, and connecting to a WPA Personal network.

For the other points we were muffled by a lack of wireframes, which is my fault. I've attached a comparison of "Connect to “<network>”", “Connect to Hidden Network", “Set Up Hotspot", and "Change Hotspot Setup". These illustrate why I think they should all be dialogs, rather than some being dialogs and some being stack pages. Making them dialogs with buttons makes it clear exactly when the hotspot will turn on, and exactly when any changes will take effect. What do you think?

[Jussi Pakkanen (jpakkane)]

I did a quick test in Qml, which is attached. It's missing the explanatory text at the top but otherwise it should be good. This is a single page in the stack with the following properties:

- whether hotspot is on or not is explicitly clear
- entry boxes become uneditable when hotspot is turned ot
- hotspot can't be turned on if password or ssid is empty

Having all this on a single page is easier to implement and, at least in my personal opinion, easier to use.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-system-settings - 0.3+14.10.20140708.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
ubuntu-system-settings (0.3+14.10.20140708.1-0ubuntu1) utopic; urgency=low

  [ CI bot ]
  * Resync trunk

  [ Jussi Pakkanen ]
  * Add support for creating a hotspot. (LP: #1326271)
 -- Ubuntu daily release <email address hidden> Tue, 08 Jul 2014 16:17:14 +0000