Re: Vanishing nm-applet icon?

[Tony Espy <espy canonical com>]

On 03/15/2010 07:27 PM, Dan Williams wrote:
> 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 --

I've seen this *once* on my other laptop running Lucid ( shortly after 
Alpha3 ).  The applet was running, so it's most likely one of the latter 
two causes...

I will continue to keep any eye out for this, and try and get debug info 
from folks if I see any bugs entered/updated relating to this.

Regards,
/tony