[DONE] Network indicator is wrong on Cinnamon

[pccobbler]

This PC is 6-7 years old with Intel processor and board. The networking is slightly complicated and I suspect Mageia is getting confused by that. The onboard Ethernet has been disabled in BIOS (it still works, though), with an Intel PCI card doing the Ethernet duties. There is also a Linksys Broadcom-based wireless PCI card.

I just built a new Cinnamon system and updated until there were no more updates to be had. I looked at the default networking icons. The world one had a green checkmark next to it, but the other one had an X next to it. I removed the X-ed one, but a replacement immediately appeared, the one with two PCs, but it has a red X next to it. The tooltip on it is "Networking disabled." I am using the system to write this message, so the networking is definitely not disabled. When I look at the tooltip for the world icon, I see "Networking is up on interface Wired (Ethernet)," followed by the usual IP addresses. The system is connected to the Internet via Ethernet.

I have used a few other Linux distributions on this PC, most recently Linux Mint, as well as Windows 7 and 8.1, and they were never confused by networking.

When I right-mouse-click on the two-PCs icon, I do not see a Remove option, so I'm not sure how to remove it from the screen. As a test, I deselected "Enable notifications," but the red X remained.

Any hints?

[martinw]

The "world" icon is the Mageia networking applet. The "two PCs" icon is the NetworkManager applet. These are two alternatives that do more or less the same job. The Mageia applet works if the "network" service is enabled and the NetworkManager applet works if the "NetworkManager" service is enabled. The default in Mageia is to enable the network service (and hence the the Mageia networking applet) and to disable the NetworkManager service. It's generally not a good idea to enable both, as they interfere with each other.

Unfortunately the NetworkManager applet can't be removed from the Cinnamon desktop, so if you want to use the Mageia applet, you are stuck with the second, non-working, icon. My solution was to switch to using NetworkManager, and to remove the Mageia applet.

[pccobbler]

Thanks for the information.

[doktor5000]

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [DONE], thanks