Jon Rogers

Ubuntu 11.04 (AKA Natty Narwhal) eliminates all kinds of Gnome Applets – most of which I didn’t use or need. One that I realised that I miss today is the proxy switcher applet. When I’m at college (LST), I need to switch to use their proxy – and back again at home. I want that to be simple and painless, not open up something from the menu and muck about with all that.

There is no ‘indicator applet’ for Natty to switch proxy location. However, Chromium can do it for me (and maybe Firefox could too, I’ve not tried.) I’ve installed Proxy Switchy from the Chrome Web Store, which sticks a little icon by the address bar in Chromium. I added a profile for LST and made the button work as a binary toggle from LST to direct connection. Since Chrome doesn’t control its own proxy settings it works for the system, I can happily switch between locations in my browser. Problem solved without needing to write a new indicator applet!