Since the latest update in Ubuntu 10.10, the nm-applet has started doing some strange things. I boot up the PC, all is fine, internet works, etc… but after a period of time, approx and hour, the nm-applet menu in the Gnome panel fails to respond. when I click on the icon, the menu appears, all looks well, but when I select any option, eg DISCONNECT, nothing happens. Even the VPN sub menu disappears (no triangle to select the menu.) However I do not lose the network connection…
If I Run this script:
killall nm-applet
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager restart
nm-applet
all returns as normal, for a while… weird?
i tried uninstall/reinstall… I even reinstalled Ubuntu, but once the latest updates are applied this issues arises…
Any help?
Best Answer
Certain sources (notably Elementary Desktop's PPA) have a version of network-manager-gnome which is newer than the one in the canonical maverick repository. A fix has been issued for Natty, but is not in the Maverick repos yet. So Ubuntu sees the newer version in elementary-desktop, uses that instead of the canonical one and, hence, the bug.
The solution is to roll back the version of network-manager-gnome to the 0.8.1+git.20100809t190028.290dc70-0ubuntu3 from 0.8.2+git.20101123t161608.f143e76-0ubuntu1
This can be done from synaptic by searching for network-manager-gnome and then clicking 'force version' in the package menu and selecting the 0.8.1 version.