what's wrong with my popen reasoning?

[Rick Spencer]

Hi all,

I am very new to Python programming. I am writing a program to manage
wireless connections, this is for GNOME on Linux. I present the user with
a "connect" button. I want to handle the connection for them slightly
different depending on whether or not the wireless access point they are
trying to connect to is secure. In either case, I have a similar question. 

In the first case, the wireless access point is secured. I want to bring
up the GNOME applet for configuring a wireless access interface.  I can
pass the command line commands to bring it up, but I can't figure out how
to bring it up in a modal fashion, so that my Python program waits for the
user to dismiss it before my program gets control again.

In the second case, the access point is not secured. I just want to fire
off the command line utility (iwconfig) for connecting. In this case, I
want my program to wait until iwconfig is done before continuing on. I
figure that I could just write a line of code to read in from the console,
but I thought there might be a more pythonic way of doing it. 

Here's my function so far, with variables replaced with constants to make
it easier to read:

def connect_clicked(self, widget, data=None):
 if locked:
  os.popen("sudo network-admin -c ath0")
  self.emit('connection-attempted', "ath0")

 else:
  os.popen("sudo iwconfig ath0 ap 00:0F:B3:31:CB:01")
 self.emit('connection-attempted', "ath0")

Thanks much!

Cheers, Rick