We have a couple of Acer Aspire One net books which we continually have silly little hiccups with. We finally had quite a big issue happen very recently one of the net books just refused to connect to the internet at all.

The symptoms were quite obvious.

  1. No matter what I did i couldn’t connect to a network, even though I could connect with other devices
  2. The network icon was missing in the taskbar
  3. I was unable to access the network center from the main preferences menu, the context menu or the command line

As the AA1 has a strong tendency to just die without warning when the battery runs out I suspected that it may have been caused by a corrupt file or three.

So now for the solution…

Turns out it is as simple as deleting a few files in order to force the networking to reset itself and not as severe as re-imaging the whole machine as Acer support has mentioned to a lot of people who have has the same kind of problems. It would be nice if companys who provide machines with linux on it would take the time to use google to find the solution instead of having a windows monkey sat on the phone not having a clue what they are doing and giving duff advice.

All right i’ll stop ranting now… the command you need to get everything running smoothly is

rm -Rf ~/.gconf/system/networking/*

This removes all the network connection settings and no need to use sudo. All you need do then is reboot and wait for the network manager to appear so you can connect to your network again.

Hope this manages to help some people