[Ayatana] How do I know when I'm connected to the network successfully?

[Scott Ritchie <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 for a friend who had never used Ubuntu
before.  After the installation we were trying to remember the wifi
password.

We took an initial guess at the password, and were left confused about
whether or not it worked.  There was no feedback other than some
animation in the indicator, however we couldn't figure out if that meant
"connected" or "connecting" or was just the normal status.  There's no
text on the icon to explain what it's doing, and clicking the indicator
doesn't help either.

I couldn't figure out if it was connecting, connected, or giving up
after a bad password.

We ended up having to open Firefox and see if it loads a page in order
to tell that the wifi password was wrong.  This process repeated about 5
times until we finally remembered the right password (and then saw a
network manager notification).


In short, the process of connecting to the internet for the very first
time did not work very well, as the indicator in its current form is
simply failing to indicate what we needed to know.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie