Comment 2 for bug 1664399

Thanks for the link. I have done some basic testing and it's working all right. The author of the post you've linked to says that it is not enabled by default in Debian because the request to check for connectivity may be tracked and this may be a privacy concern. However, it's enabled by default in Fedora and may also be so in other (at least non-Debian) distributions. There is, of course, the point that GNOME Network Manager is also used in Ubuntu Unity and Xubuntu, and I don't know whether this would cause any difference there.

The only minor irritation is, as mentioned in the blog article, that the login window comes up after the given timeout, but obtrudes upon the foreground, cutting off the current task. It would be OK if it were held in the background and the user notified by the standard notification system that the window was ready. In Fedora, I seem to remember that the window did not appear at all after the timeout but the NM icon changed to a question mark. However, that creates a problem because the login window cannot be accessed manually. But I may be wrong. Fedora has the configuration file in /usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/ and I rooted around both there and in /etc/NetworkManager/ but could not figure out anything else that could be relevant. Anyway, the window appearing in the foreground is still a minor inconvenience, given the overall usefulness of having the captive portal login facility and the fact that the network does not usually keep getting logged out of.