Unable to connect to the internet, Network menu has disappeared

Question

I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on Lenovo Think-pad laptop some months ago. Everything has been working fine until yesterday. Don't know whether something hasn't updated correctly. Very new to Ubuntu and non-technical. Tried following thread for this problem by following instructions:

Open Terminal

sudo apt-get install libappindicator1

Pressed enter and received message that not all "information" could be recovered from archives, or something like that continued with the following instructions in Terminal:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop  
sudo apt-get install unity  
sudo shutdown -r now

After shutting down I restarted, but the network menu was still not there. Then I followed instructions in Ubuntu help to get error messages from Terminal as follows:

(nm-applet:2379): WARNING: Could not initialize NMClient /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager: The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files

(nm-applet2379): nm-applet-WARNING: Error connecting to ModemManager: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Modem-Manager1: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed: Cannot launch daemon,file not found or permission invalid

(nm-applet:2379): nm-applet-WARNING: Could not find ShellVersion property on org.gnome.Shell after 5 tries

(nm-applet:2379): nm-applet-WARNING: Failed to register as an agent: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files

Similar error messages were also generated in the Terminal before I tried the troubleshooting steps found in the thread but the nm-applet number was 2867, not 2379.

I only have Ubuntu installed on my Lenovo laptop but also run a separate laptop with MS Windows with no internet connection issues, so I know there is not problem with my Wifi.

Check out the answer I gave here: http://askubuntu.com/a/772695/271 — Andrea Lazzarotto, May 15 '16 at 11:32
Before you do anything with a repository, like apt-get install, always do apt-get update to update the list of packages. — Anders, May 15 '16 at 12:10
Check out the answer I gave here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/772317/network-manager-crashes/772324 — nobody, May 15 '16 at 12:42

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 15 '16 at 11:43

I had a similar problem once and by changing nm-applet to launch with dbus-launch nm-applet solved my problem. To see if this will work for you, run in terminal

dbus-launch nm-applet

and see if network menu shows up. If menu shows than to make the fix permanent, edit

/etc/xdg/autostart/nm-applet.desktop

and change

Exec=nm-applet

to

Exec=dbus-launch nm-applet

Hope it will help you.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 17 '16 at 16:57

This is caused by a regression resulting network-manager not to be able to start. Here is the procedure to fix it (as this has already been fixed with an update):

revert to an previous version
start network service again
Install the latest updates

Revert to an older version

Open your terminal and issue the following

sudo apt-get install libnl-3-200=3.2.21-1 libnl-route-3-200=3.2.21-1 libnl-genl-3-200=3.2.21-1

Note: if for some reason, the packages are not in the cache folder, you will need to download them from another computer:

Download links for amd64: libnl libnl-genl libnl-route
Download links for i386: libnl libnl-genl libnl-route

Then open a terminal in the folder where you saved them and install them with

sudo dpkg -i libnl-*.deb

Start Network Service

sudo service network-manager start

Then you will be automatically connected to the internet

Reverting to an older version

Install the latest updates

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

As you can see from the following changlog, this has been fixed and you can safely update

Unable to connect to the internet, Network menu has disappeared

2 Answers2