The Internet connection icon in the notification area of my desktop panel shows the status of my computer's connection to my LAN and hence to the www – at least, it did from the date of first connection, in late 2013, until about December of 2014. It was infallible. Then, shortly before Christmas last year, router trouble on the LAN meant that no Internet service was available for the best part of a week whilst repairs/replacements were effected. Restoration of the LAN brought all four of my computers back on line (1 Linux Mint and 3 Windows XP) Ostensibly nothing had, nor needed to be, changed, as far as net connection addresses were concerned. The XP computers simply picked up where they had left off some days earlier but the Linux machine returned with a disabled LAN connection icon that has remained in that state ever since. Nothing else is affected, I continue to log on and off as normal and enjoy the same network services as before but nothing will now persuade the connection icon to change its disconnected state. If I right click the icon, and then click 'Connection Information', I get, “No valid active connections found,” which is at complete variance with the facts. I have used the 'Edit Connections' option but can find nothing apparently amiss. Wired Connection 1 appears to have retained its previous settings so the loss of function is a bit of a mystery. Anyone got any ideas?

Have you tried

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Router/dhcp?

It is after all, just an icon. If all the things that matter work ok, who cares?

Fred.

No. Until now I did not know that the command existed . The response was, "ifup: interface eth0 already configured."

Well I do. If I find out why the icon isn't working I might learn more about Linux network connections. If I take the, "Who cares?" approach I won't.

So, does that mean you are able get to internet?
If so, have you tried to right-click on taskbar and re-add the icon?

My network access is unaffected. Like the three XP computers, the Linux machine came back on line apparently unaffected by the outage, except that the disconnected 'plugs' in the icon failed to reconnect - a situation that is now permanent. If I hover the cursor over the icon I get the message, "No network connection," which is patently untrue. It continues to maintain that fiction as I send this response to your last post.

If I edit the connection, by right-clicking the icon, I find all the addresses etc. to be unchanged from what they were before the router failed. These settings are obviously correct because they are those used by the computer to maintain a perfectly normal connection to the Internet.

I have tried right-clicking the panel in order to add a second copy of the icon to the notification area but it is not contained in the list of icons offered. I dare not delete the original because I have no idea what it is called, nor where I can find it if I want to redisplay it - not that it is performing any useful function at the moment. Besides that, I don't know how it was displayed in the first place. It just appeared automatically when wired connection 1 was fist established.

One option, I suppose, would be to delete wired connection 1 and then recreate it - a step that I was hoping to avoid if only I could find out why the existing icon can no longer detect the status of the Internet connection.

What DE unity, gnome, cinnamon,etc?

My computer was bought with Linux Mint pre-installed and I have not idea how to determine which DE was installed. It could be Mate. How do I check?

Don't answer that. I found out how to do it in the end. It is Mate.

Hi,

Do you use Network Manager or the old method of network configuration.

My tray icon shows a nice white on red cross. This is because I told Network Manager to leave eth0 alone.

Cheers

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Ah! Now that is interesting. It is always gratifying to find other people with the same problem, or something very similar. I suspect that you may have found the key to this issue.

I tried this first and got the response:-

The hope that this might provide the solution was soon dashed, however. Nothing happened and repeating the command gave the same result each time.

The next discovery was that /etc does not contain a file entitled, or referring to, Network Manager. It looks as though it is not installed, which could explain one or two other strange features. Even when the icon correctly showed the status of the network it was very capricious. Sometimes it displayed in the notification area on start-up. Sometimes it didn't, in which case it could then pop up unexpectedly at some later time. Now it is permanently displayed but disabled.

I used the search box to look for NetworkManager and was offered three installations:-

What do I do now? Install the lot or just a subset or do something else?

Did you check the settings in NetworkManager.conf?