AspireOne lost wireless settings

I bought an Acer AspireOne (running Linux - I assume Linpus, but can't find a version) about 6 months ago for my mother-in-law. I set up the wireless networking so it would connect to my home wireless network and it worked for about 6 months, and all was good in the land.

About a week ago, my wireless router experienced a "hiccup" -- my windows laptop lost connectivity to wireless, so I restarted the router and the network came back on the windows laptop, but not on the AspireOne.

If I try to hit the internet through the Connect Window, Browser, I get server cannot be found.

The light to the right of the wireless switch is on. I turned it off, restarted the computer, turned it back on, tried again, no change. I tried connecting to my network via cable, and still cannot connect to the internet, even though I have link lights on the network port.

If I go into Settings and click (or double-click) on Network Center, nothing happens; however, in Settings, System, Networks, I see the Realtek RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet and the Atheros AR5006EG 802.11 b/g Wireless PCI Express, but can't look at the settings for either of them.

There is no network or wireless icon in what would be the tool tray on a Windows computer. There is one icon that's a blue square with "EN" in it, but clicking it doesn't do anything. Any other icons (there are 3 plus the off button) in the "tool tray" are definitely not related to either wireless or networking.

I've seen a lot of comments on this board (and some others) about upgrading the AspireOne to Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux, but I would rather just get Linpus to work - that way I don't have to worry about teaching my mother-in-law how to operate yet another piece of technology.

My Linux experience is limited to me playing with puppy Linux for a couple weeks about a year or two ago--I dropped it due to time considerations and the fact that my job requires me to stay fairly current with Windows (XP and server 2003), but I remember in puppy linux there was a way to launch the network configuration wizard to reconfig the network.

Is there a terminal command to do that in Linpus? Is there another solution that would get the wireless connection back? Is there, somewhere, a viable manual for the AspireOne, something that has some real troubleshooting in it, rather than the rote, step-by-step, as-long-as-everything-works-just-exactly-right stuff?

Thanks much for any assistance you can provide.

 

I have exactly the same issue with the little AAOne that I recently bought my wife.

As well as really struggling to get her new VFone Mobile Connect dongle to work - in fact, searching through the forum here it seems that just plugging the dongle in may well have forced the Wireless Connections to be lost and Network Manager to freeze.

I suppose the key question is that if I don't have the time to really investigate some of these issues for Linux Linpus lite - should I really look into installing something tried and tested and easier to manage like XP - and if so how do I go about this?

Sorry, just spend a couple of evenings "searching the dark depths".....

THanks

 

Odd problem. Don't know what happened to the software -- just losing the wireless connection wouldn't make it behave quite like that....

But - try the following steps:

Press "ALT-F2"

Enter "terminal" into the dialog, and press "Run".

In the terminal window that appears, enter the following command:

sudo service NetworkManager restart

followed by enter. Case of the letters is IMPORTANT (unlike Microsoft OSs). You should have your network icon back in the lower right. Things should now "just work'". The problem is that *something else* has happened, and it probably won't survive a power down cycle. If the network manager doesn't come up, we know to look at that component.

Try this, INCLUDING the power cycle, and report on what happens. We then have to dig through your startup sequence (if the network manager DID come back up).

Did you apply any updates to the basic OS?

 

OK -- when I restart the NetworkManager, I get an OK for stopping, and an OK for starting, but I still don't get a network icon in the tool tray. I also still cannot click/dbl-click on the Network icon under settings.

Did the restart and the Network Icon was not available. I restarted the NetworkManager services again, with no change.

And, no, shamefully, I have not applied any patches to the OS - I don't normally handle it unless there's a problem -- that means I configured it for wireless when we got it, then it was handed to me when the network connections quit working. I see an opportunity for training, but don't know how effective it will be

Thanks for any ideas you can give me.

 

Ok, what I think has happened is you lost your "notification area". Sometimes the window manager rewrites these, and this operation may have failed (why? don't know, maybe cosmic rays?)

ALT-F2 xfce4-panel -a <enter>

The "-a" IS important. Highlight "System Tray" and hit the "Add" button. Close the xfce4-panel application.

Now, you should restart to confirm that the new panel setting is persistent.

The network icon should now be back, and you should be back in business.

Give a report, of course.

 

OK -- ran the ALT-F2 xfce4-panel -a <enter>

Highlighted "System Tray" and hit the "Add" button.

Got "There is already a system tray running on this screen" dialog box with a "close" button.

Clicked "Close" and got "Could not open "systray" module" with another "Close" button.

Clicked "Close" and the entire xfce4 panel went away.

Still could not open the Network Center, and there is still no Network icon in the tool tray (although there are other icons there, always have been).

Did a reboot, repeated process with same results.

Anything else that I should look at?

 

Its getting difficult -- I am beginning to think hardware failure...

Can you type "dmesg" and send me the output? (the Acer doesn't maintain normal Linux logs, to save wear&tear for SSD).

Thanks
fweigel.

 

And just to verify the system tray -- the icons that should be there are the keyboard selector (optional), network and battery. Is the battery icon present?

fweigel

 

In the system tray, there's a battery (or AC Plug, if connected), there's an English/Keyboard icon, Volume, and this icon that is a blue square with the letters "EN" inside the square -- nothing comes up when I hover the mouse cursor over this last icon, and clicking/double-clicking or right-clicking does nothing to this icon.

Attached are the logs. Just as a note, neither the wireless or the wired connection works -- I have turned on the wireless (light's on, icon flashes on the screen) and tried wireless, turned off, rebooted and tried wired and wireless, and neither will attach. However, if I do a scan, I do see several wireless networks -- mine and some of my neighbors. I changed the channel on my wireless router and the information displayed on the wireless scan changed to reflect the new channel, so I don't think it's hardware.

Thanks again

 

Both the ethernet and wireless are showing up. You may want to try without the 128B USB stick plugged in, but I doubt it would make a difference.

Unless you can find a Linux guru there, I would recommend re-loading.