1

So I tried out LUbuntu 18.04 with a Live USB stick. Everything worked great! I could immediately see that there were WiFi networks, find my network, enter the passphrase and get connected. But after I did a minimal install so I could fit it onto a 4GB USB flash drive, I discovered that WiFi was nowhere to be seen.

I found this question and tried sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome. But nothing showed up even after running nm-applet. I found this page and followed the steps to make it appear in the panel automatically, and the re-logged and it still didn't show up.

Then I found this question and in a comment I found this:

sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager 
sudo systemctl start NetworkManager

And that worked! But when I tried to connect to my WiFi after entering the password it didn't do anything - no messages, or errors, or anything - it just silently refused to connect! Also, the appearance of this widget wasn't quite as slick as the one in the LiveUSB.

At some point I also found this where I found and ran this command:

sudo service network-manager restart

But I still couldn't get WiFi to work. At some point I found someone suggest this:

sudo apt-get purge network-manager-gnome
sudo apt-get install wicd

But when I tried to run the Wicd Network Manager I got the error describe at this question. I tried the answer which (modified to include all the necessary sudos) looked like this:

sudo service wicd stop
sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf
sudo rm /var/lib/wicd/resolv.conf.orig
sudo ln -s /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf /var/lib/wicd/resolv.conf.orig
sudo service wicd start

And now it connected to Wifi, although the interface was totally different from the LiveUSB, but... nothing would resolve on DNS. Even when I plugged into wired Ethernet STILL nothing would work, it's like DNS suddenly broke! The only way anything is working now is I manually edited /etc/resolv.conf (which was empty) and added:

nameserver 1.1.1.1

But I was reading somewhere that LUbuntu tries to run a DNS service of some kind on loopback (really? yech!) which makes me think that got broken somehow. I really want to just get things to simply working the way they did in the Live USB. What did I do wrong and how can I fix it?

1 Answer 1

1

I didn't find a perfect solution while installed on an undersized USB flash drive - I went back and uninstall / purged wicd, and then re-installed network-manager-gnome, and at that point it started working better than before. With a larger USB flash drive I would recommend just doing a full install, as then everything works "out of the box".

In general, the solution I ultimately went with was to get a larger SSD instead of using a USB flash drive and do the full install, as USB flash experiences frequent pauses whenever lots of random writes are happening which is an issue SSD does not have.

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .