Hello all, my system crashed while getting ready to update Wine in synaptic package manager. I had not changed anything yet and the system locked up. I had to hard reset and when it came back up my auto start for the applet netspeed said it could not load. I looked in the "add to applet list" and the applet is gone. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it with both Synaptic package manager and terminal and then reset the system and still nada.

Any Idea's?

1) what distro?
2) judging from your description, you still have connectivity, so it's only the applet. what applet is that? networkmanagers nm-applet? or your panel's own applet?

Ooops, My Bad. It was late and I did not realize that my signature had not been updated.

I am running Ultimate Edition 4.2 Release Base: debootstrapped (Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Thar tree)
Environment(s): Mate 1.8.0

Yes it seems to just be the basic applet that comes with the distro. It normally resided up in the top panel.

It just gave me a the up and down at glance.

erm, i still don't understand which distro that is, but "something ubuntu-based with mate desktop" will do for now.

supposing the panel is called mate-panel...

first of all, right-click it, get into preferences and see if you can just add the applet back in.
if not, or if it doesn't stick across sessions (any helpful messages?), do this:

open a terminal.
typeand see if you get helpful messages when adding the network applet.
post those messages here, or better even, the complete terminal output.

Ok so I already talked about the fact that I tried your first suggestion but I did do the other two and this is what happened.

handy@handy-Inspiron-545:~$ killall mate-panel
handy@handy-Inspiron-545:~$ mate-panel
Cannot register the panel shell: there is already one running.

When I did the first command you could see that it did indeed stop the panel for a second but then came back up.
The second command give the third response.

I went ahead and took a screen shot of the applet list to show that it is not in there.

Also took a screen shot of the Synaptic Package Manager to show that it says it is installed.
Like I said, I have uninstalled both of these and reinstalled them and restarted many times and it makes no difference.

Very strange!

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So I went through some steps to remove netspeed from the terminal. I even used root privilege to auto remove all the extra junk. I then went back to Synaptic Package Installer and reinstalled the applet and the extras that it asked for. After finishing I checked the list on the add to panel and it still was not there even after a restart. I went to terminal again and typed sudo netspeed and it says

sudo: netspeed: command not found
handy@handy-Inspiron-545:~$

If I'm doing something wrong just let me know.

yeah, it doesn't work like that, but nevermind.

so restarting mate-panel hasn't helped, but it was worth checking (and it's ok, your session manager just restarted it automatically)

but,
re your synaptic screenshot:
there's something for your unity, and there's something for gnome, but there's nothing for mate? and you're running mate-panel?

you should search for mate panel applets (you will need to use the extended search by clicking on the magnifying glass).

Thank you ondoho for your help. After travailing with Linux for over a week I have finally decided that I am done with Linux. There are simply too many variables and too many Distro's out there. Forum support is weak at best and that is not simply because of the folks that use them but the fact that there are simply too many Distro's and you folks simply don't know what is going on in most of these Distro's either because you have not used them or someone else changed it for their own use. There are also several problems with Linux and some of them have been around for years without being fixed. In my opinion this is simply sad. They should work on fixing the inherent issues first before going to another kernel or Distro version. The biggest thing that is holding Linux back is the fact that Manufacturers are not willing to go through the trouble to make drivers for Linux. Some do and that's great but most do not and the back door hacks they have to make to make up for those lack of said drivers leaves a lot to be desired. In the end the reason I decided I was done was because the wireless was crashing my machine sometimes 3 to 4 times. After careful research I found that this is a major problem with at least the last 3 kernel updates and still has not been fixed. I need a computer that is stable and Linux is simply not it.

Sorry for the rant. Just frustrated. In the end I lost my XP partition because of someone's bad boot loader info. So I had to start all over.

i'm sorry to hear that.
i agree that the choice is overwhelming.
it's the price of freedom.

One could get the impression that all those distros are equally good or stable, and one simply has to make a choice of what seems the most appealing. but alas, not so.

I had a look at your "ultimate edition" on distrowatch...
nothing there sounds very convincing to me:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ultimatewhy single button? an upgrade should not be taken lightly on any operating system. i am already very wary of this.

but it continues:
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=08515someone's surely full of themselves. how long-lived was this distro in your opinion?

what can you learn from this? don't trust the bigmouths. don't trust any random one-man-project. it takes a lot more to create something widely usable.
make an informed choice before installing a new operating system.
browsing sites like LQ or distrowatch can help with that.

i'd say chalk it up to experience, and try again with e.g. Linux Mint Mate. Or another of the big and truly long-lived ones
If you don't like the looks, that's the easiest thing to change, as you already recognized.