I am about 2 weeks into ubuntu/Linux as a newbie. I have installed 10.04 on several machines as well as imbedded inside VISTA. All of these installs work fine except the one on my HP Pavillion dv9000.

The synaptics device on these machines is very touchy in all operating systems, but caused a strange issue in ubuntu 10.10. While connected to the internet and working fine I barely touched the pad and everything quit. I rebooted and found no way to reconnect to the internet. On the panel there was a little icon about the connection manager. Hovering over this icon gave the message "Connection Manager daemon not working". The usual tab to "enable networking" was dim and could not be activated.

I searched for several hours and found no reference regarding this daemon. Is there a source of the op sys names for such daemons and what sort of terminal command would I use to restart it if I knew what it was called?

I ended up scrubbing the partition and reinstalling. Even the recovery process would not get the daemon to restart.

thanks for you help
tom

After scrubbing the partition and reloading ubuntu 10.10/LINUX I continue to have minor issues with the Synaptic touch pad on the HP - as I see a lot of others have as well. So far I have not experienced the same problem with the Connection Manager being disabled and turned off. I also run VISTA on this same machine and have similar issues with the Synaptics touch pad interrupting typing operations while in VISTA. I have no idea what is going on internally as far as the hardware is concerned - but even close proximity to the touch pad while typing will occasionally freeze the keyboard. Perhaps a faulty touch pad or a bit of static. I live where the relative humidity is typically less than 10%.

At this point I am writing the whole issue off to strange hardware response to static discharge. But, I would like find a way to restart the Communications Manager Daemon if it does get turned off again.