Temporary Fix For Missing Network-Manager Icon in Xubuntu 14.04

I decided to upgrade my work laptop and my home desktop computer last night from Xubuntu 13.10 to Xubuntu 14.04. Everything went pretty smooth until I noticed that the Network-Manager icon was missing from the notification area.

A quick Google search showed me that this was a wide spread problem. One user wrote a blog post on how to fix it in Lubuntu, but that wasn't cutting the mustard for me on Xubuntu. Manually running nm-applet didn't work either.

I did notice that even though the icon wasn't there, the nm-applet process was running in the background.

I decided to try to kill that process, and manually run nm-applet again. No dice. I then decided to try running nm-applet as root by running gksu nm-applet. That worked! WTF?

Since I can't figure out how to change permissions to make it run as my normal user, I decided to work around this issue by changing my startup settings as follows:

• Go to Menu > Settings Manager > Session and Startup > Application Autostart Tab
• Uncheck the entry for Network (You can't remove it)

• Next click Add, except use gksu nm-applet for the command

• Now reboot

When you login you will have to enter your password each time, but you should now see your Network-Manager  icon in the notification area. Yes it sucks to have to enter your password, but at least it works until the folks at Xubuntu can fix this bug.

Did you have the same issue? Do you know of a better way to fix it? Let us know in the comments!

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