Sugar control panel's Network > Wireless Radio checkbox does nothing if Power > Extreme power management checked

[skierpage]

Using 8.2-759, nothing displayed in my Neighborhood view. I went into Sugar control panel > Network > Radio and Wireless Radio was checked. Toggling it had no effect, because I had enabled Power > Extreme power management.

It seems the power option overrides the network option, so maybe the control panel could disable wireless radio option when Extreme power management is checked, and/or display a warning "wireless disabled by Power > Extreme power management".

[HoboPrimate]

What is happening here is a duplication of the same option in the Control Panel, under Network and Power.

Apparently the option in Power is the overriding one.

I think that, the thinking of adding the same option under Network was for those more savvy users who know what a wireless radio is, and want a way to turn it off, and thus go looking for it under Network. On the other hand, non-savvy users who may care to save as much power as possible will go looking in Power.

Since this is a laptop for kids, I would go with the 2nd option.

But If you want to cater to both kinds of users, then make the strings of the options be the same, and make it so both options are synchronized to avoid what happened to the reporter of this ticket.

[mstone-xmlrpc]

Pushing out to 9.1.0, per edmcnierney's request.

[gnu]

The two options are not the same -- Extreme Power Management also disables the USB bus, as well as turning off the radio (and maybe in future doing other things).

So this ticket is correct, but possibly irrelevant. It should be possible to turn the radio off with both "Radio Off" and "Extreme Power Management". If either of them is set, the radio will be off. There's no real need to link them, or to grey out "Radio Off" if "Extreme Power Management" is set.

(As an aside, I find the whole idea of greying-out items and making them unresponsive to be one of the real terrible ideas in user interface design, courtesy of Apple. If something is grey and you click on it, it should TELL YOU WHY IT'S GREY so you can fix it. If you didn't want to do that thing, you wouldn't have clicked on it. In command-line interfaces, you can order the machine to do something invalid, and it will report why it can't. In grey GUIs, it's like 1984, there's simply no way to phrase that question, nor get an answer.