knetworkmanager not starting at all

Question

It seems that my knetworkmanager is not starting anymore. Read: In KDE4's sys tray I don't have a icon to manage my networks. Also when starting it from terminal or kick off menu literally "nothing" happens. I don't know what's wrong with it.
I tried to start it via Alt + F2 - also nothing. Maybe also worth to note that in the terminal no error occurs, the command return ready for the next input, not the slightest error message. ó_O?

Sadly after reading this answer on superuser.com it seems I can not connect to wifi via iwconfig 'cause my network is WPA2 encrypted. (Basically I can not set they passphrase -> invalid argumenterror.)

So it seems I've to get knetworkmanger running again as I also can't download other tools. I've tried stuff like

sudo service network-manager restart

but it didn't seem to help.

I'm kinda puzzled so any help for this would be appreciated.

PS: If it hasn't become clear: The whole drama of is simply I can't connect to wifi and internet :o)

Edit:
As suggested I tried to reinstall network-manager-kde* and it is pretty much the same except one difference: It said something about a something.so library.
Sadly I couldn't save the something because the usb flash drive is mounted as read only (another issue I have -sight-).
(It was a 2 liner and continued stating to switch back do some q-foo... default mode hence I reckon the manager has started up no visual reference (systray icon) ).

However, notice that upon observing this I have re-uninstalled and re-re-installed the network manager to see if I could reproduce the error but no luck. Haven't tried rebooting though as I'm downloading a new ubuntu image and properly just upgrade the full system after saving /home.

*If you run into the same situation: Need to install something without having network access: google the package name and download it from ubuntu make sure to select the right version though! In my case I got a .deb file which I simply copied on my usb stick and installed it on the system via double click in the file manager (doplhin in my case). So don't panic if you run into these troubles! :)

Answer 1

I have the same problem with knetworkmanager. Tried reinstalling, but no success.

Here is the output from running knetworkmanager from cli:

$ knetworkmanager
knotify(15737) KNotify::event: 3  ref= 0
knetworkmanager(17694)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:
knetworkmanager(17694)/kdecore (KLibrary) kde4Factory: The library "/usr/lib/kde4/solid_networkmanager07.so" does not offer a qt_plugin_instance function.
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)
QSystemTrayIcon::setVisible: No Icon set

Running ps -ef | grep '[N]et':

~$ ps -ef | grep '[N]et'
root      1012     1  0 18:33 ?        00:00:00 NetworkManager

In the end I installed wicd and that is bringing up the wireless network:

~$ sudo apt-get install wicd wicd-cli wicd-curses wicd-daemon wicd-gtk

And it works flawlessly!