Reinstalling network manager & icon issues

Question

I just updated to ubuntu 14.04 LTE and network manager is giving me a question mark in my system tray even though I can connect to the internet. This really irritates me.

I tried hiding network manager in system and and making it reappear to see if it would reset but it hasn't. I also tried switching themes and rebooting system to see if it would reset icons, but this doesn't work either...

I'm out of ideas so I was thinking of reinstalling network manager... My question: If I reinstall or remove network manager, can my computer still connect to the internet or not?

I dont want to uninstall it and then not have internet to redownload it again. I'd appreciate some info on the proper procedure for this.

Can I just do sudo aptitude reinstall network-manager?

Thanks.

EDIT

I also deleted the cache folder (/var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/) and rebooted my system. This also did not work.

Moreover, if I click on network manager icon in system tray, there's an icon in the middle with bars which is grayed out. Does anyone know what that means? I can't click on it for some reason...

Do you have to have network-manager package to have internet working? I wanted to try and uninstall/reinstall it but wasn't sure if I would be able to if I did as I thought it might be required for internet to work.

Answer 1

I solved the issue and learned a few things:

network-manager package manages all connections the internet (ethernet, wifi, etc). You can use network manager or configure internet connection using /etc/network/interfaces file. I did the latter which is why I had internet, but did not configure network manager.

All I did was set /etc/network/interfaces to the following:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Then in network manager, add the ethernet connection to the list of active devices!