I recently applied some software updates to my Ubuntu 14.04 desktop. I noticed right after I did that that the NetworkManager applet disappeared, leaving my laptop unable to automatically connect to the network.
When I tried running nm-applet manually, I got this message:
(nm-applet:6238): nm-applet-WARNING **: Failed to register as an agent: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files
(nm-applet:6238): nm-applet-WARNING **: Failed to register as an agent: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files
^Cnm-applet-Message: PID 0 (we are 6238) sent signal 2, shutting down…
I know how to run
dhclient eth0
… and plug in an Ethernet cable to get back onto the network, so I did and then did some sleuthing. It turns out that I had the trusty/proposed repository enabled, and that a network-manager package in that repository has a bug. This resulted in the following error message when one tries to run NetworkManager manually:
root@savannah:/etc/init.d# NetworkManager
(NetworkManager:6288): GLib-WARNING **: GError set over the top of a previous GError or uninitialized memory.
This indicates a bug in someone’s code. You must ensure an error is NULL before it’s set.
The overwriting error message was: Key file does not have group ‘connectivity’
According to this bug report, the initial fix was to downgrade network-manager (according to this page). However, a fixed version of network-manager has since been placed in trusty/proposed. If you do
apt-get upgrade network-manager
… your Ubuntu system should fetch a working network-manager.
This is all just in case my fellow Linux geeks run into this same issue.