I'be heard from about a dozen people who have this problem. I bought an Acer Aspire One and after about two hours of use, the wi-fi icon in the task bar vanished. I tried navigating to Settings > Network Center, but the program won't run. This may be due to the Live Update I did. I can't connect via ethernet cable or wi-fi.

I'm pretty confident I can follow basic instructions in terminal etc. I already found the nm-applet executable in usr/bin. But don't assume I know much more!

I have a customer who has the exact same problem as you! The icon disappeard and the network center wont run. I hope someone has a solution to this.. This is the first computer we have had running linux here at our store, so this is a bit new to us...

I bought two Acer Aspire One computers today at Circut City - nice blue ones at that! One for each of my 12 yr old twin boys. One is working great, the other has the same problem described above - wireless and network icon gone from the front panal, and clicking on the Network Center in Settings does nothing. This happened after about 3-4 hours of use. Everything else works great. I have looked high and low for some setting that may have been changed, but can find nothing. Frustrating! So, I'm taking it back tomorrow and getting a new one. Hope it does not happen again!!
But if it does, does anyone have a solution???
Thanks!!

Talked to Acer support yesterday. The only solution they came up with was full system recovery. I had to use the recovery DVD to make a recovery USB flash-drive. Not a good solution, but it solved the problem... Remember to back up your files if you do this

Thanks for the solution update joacimd. How long did the full system recovery take? Were there any complications?

I am going to take my affected machine back to Circuit City and see if they will give me a new one - I've only had it for a day! Did Acer have any idea why is happening? How can it be prevented?

Thanks!!

You're welcome! There were no complications, and the recovery took about one hour if I remember correctly. I did it at my store while i was working, so I didn't pay attention to the prosess at all times, but it was very easy to make the recovery flash-drive and to start the prosess on the computer. There's a simple guide in the user manual.

I don't know if it can be prevented. The girl I talked to at Acer support didn't know about the problem, but she talked to some colleagues, and they said that I had run the recovery. I didn't get any more information, but it seemed like they knew that the problem existed.

Good luck :-)

Files get corrupted when power is lost (battery runs out) or under certain waking from sleep conditions. I found this answer at aspireoneuser.com and it worked. You will accomplish the same thing if you restore but this is faster and less destructive. JZV

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I have had a power failure. after restarting the networking wouldn't work and I couldn't run the Network Center to restart networking. Fix is to delete the ~/.gconf/system/networking directory. This resets the networking config files forcing the NetworkManager to recreate them.

Hope this helps the linux users.

Roomonster

Had just the same problem, found this page through Google and now is everything working great again. Thank you!

I have been using linux long enough to where I should be able to handle deleting this directory but I can't find it. Can you walk me through it? I found the terminal and used su to get root, but nothing I could think of got me any closer to getting my new little buddy back on track.

In talking to a salesperson** at one Circuit City store, I learned that "they support Linux" in their service dept. Surprising statement, since the Aspire One is the only Linux-based computer they sell.

I would be very curious how Circuit City would respond if one of these malfunctioning units was brought to them.

**This is the same person that gave me a huge lecture on the shortcoming of the Aspire One with Linux (as opposed to a real computer with Windows) I finally had to push back when she said things like: "Most printers and other peripherals will not work with Linux." At this store, they also did not put the Acer on display.
In all of this, they are in the minority among all CC branches I have surveyed so far.

exact input; no root needed:

rm -rf ~/.gconf/system/networking

no feedback if you got it right. many errors possible if you got it wrong.
reboot and the network connection thing works properly again.

I bought my Aspire One monday,and now I don't have sound,network,I tried restore by the flash drive but comes some error,what I do wrong??can any body help,thanks.....Bogie

I've had my Aspire One for about 4 weeks now and have had very few problems. Yesterday I did a Live Update, it was some patch, really didn't pay attention to what it was, and now today, I am experiencing the problem described above, network not working at all, and Network Center not launching.

I tried, twice, running the command line listed by jzvisions, "rm -rf ~/.gconf/system/networking", but had no success. I had no errors when running the command, but from what I can tell, I never had a .gconf directory to begin with.

As a note, I've experienced other problems when running the updates as well, like it overwriting the mods I did to turn off the Auto-Login.

I know running the updates is suppose to be a good thing, they are suppose to rid the system of bugs and security problems, but I'm wondering if I'm going to even bother doing any of them given the problems I've seen so far.

Well, guess I'll reinstall Linpus and reconfigure it to the way I had it.

Here is a thread about the problem at the Aspire One forum.

I'm pretty sure you had the directory - but filenames starting with a period (.) are hidden on UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Try «ls -la» from terminal or press CTRL + H in file manager to see the hidden files.

Otherxise, the thread at AspireOneUsers mentiones a bad update as a possible source for the error, you might want to check that out.