Re: Vanishing nm-applet icon?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 09:19 +0900, Jacobs Shannon wrote:
> From searching in the archives, I believe this is the correct
> terminology, but I couldn't find a clear match to what I saw, nor
> any workaround or fix.
> 
> Not even sure what happened. If I did something, it was so quick
> that I didn't notice it, and I have trouble imagining that I could
> have done the same mysterious thing twice. If I didn't do anything,
> then the nm-applet icon just disappeared on its own initiative,
> which could be something troublesome...
> 
> The first time, it apparently decided to come back by itself, and I
> can't say why or what happened. The second time, I had to reboot the
> machine--but I'm keeping an eye on the critter.
> 
> I do need to access nm fairly frequently for two reasons, but I
> don't want to make an issue of those reasons unless someone thinks
> they are relevant. I actually hope that they've been fixed in later
> versions of Ubuntu, but this particular machine is an older box and
> it was getting harder and harder to update each time to the point
> where I'm now afraid to try any major upgrades...
> 
> Therefore, I think the two things I'm hoping to find now are (1) a
> reason why the nm-applet icon might disappear, and (2) an
> alternative way to access the nm settings window if the nm-applet
> icon has become invisible.

Usually it's because either the applet crashed, or NM crashed.  The
applet disappears when NM dies because obviously since NM isn't running,
the applet can't do anything anyway.

To diagnose these things, bring up a terminal and do the following:

1) ps ax | grep nm-applet
2) ps ax | grep Net

if you get something like:

1960 ?        Sl     0:09 nm-applet --sm-disable

(for the applet obviously) then the applet is running, or you'll get
something like this when NM is running:

1461 ?        Ssl    0:03 NetworkManager --pid-file=/var/run/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.pid

So what if nm-applet dies?  Check ~/.xsession-errors for more
information about what happened leading up to the crash.

If NM died, look in /var/log/messages or /var/log/daemon.log for crash
information.

The second-to-last possibility is that the notification area (the
gnome-panel widget where nm-applet lives) crashed.  That'll also show up
in ~/.xsession-errors.

The last possibility is that the applet couldn't find some required
icons, which can happen (rarely) if the GTK icon cache gets corrupted
for your icon theme.  That will show up as a message in
~/.xsession-errors or as an error dialog and is usually fixed by
deleting the "icon-theme.cache" file for your current theme from
somewhere in /usr/share/icons/.

Let me know if you find out anything from the above info!

Dan