14 DAY TRIAL // NetworkManager developer Lubomir Rintel announced today, November 6, 2016, the availability for download of the first development snapshot towards the major NetworkManager 1.6 release of the widely-used network connection manager.
NetworkManager 1.6 will probably launch next year and promises exciting new features, including Vala bindings for the libnm library, the ability to keep most network connections up during system shutdown, except Wi-Fi and VPN, and support for removing new connections or disconnect devices from the checkpoint/restore connection functionality.
Another interesting feature coming to NetworkManager 1.6 is the ability to read the configuration files from /run/NetworkManager/conf.d as well, which might be useful for configs discovered during system startup. It will also be possible to discover and set up Web Proxy settings with the PacRunner service, as well as to fine-tune the autoconnect behavior.
NetworkManager 1.5.2 development snapshot now ready for testing
Besides all the new features mentioned above, NetworkManager 1.6 will also come with support for the systemd-resolved local DNS forwarder backend. Among the bugs fixes in this first development snapshot, we can mention a patch for the emission of NM-style PropertiesChanged signals, which were replaced with PropertiesChanged on the "org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" interface, and replacement of the "permanent" unset function of the "cloned-mac-address" setting to "preserve."
"This changes the default value and affects existing connections during upgrade that did not explicitly configure cloned-mac-address. This has the effect that externally configured MAC addresses are preserved by default instead of setting the permanent address," wrote Lubomir Rintel in the mailing list announcement. Download NetworkManager 1.5.2 right now from our website, but remember that this is a pre-release version, not to be used in production environments.