I am new to this community and have been in love with Linux for the better part of a year! However, I’ve been stressing over a menial problem: my wifi connection. The connection itself is a strong and stable one, except when I close it (suspend) and reopen to continue working, it loses connection completely and shows no available connections (there are generally 10+). So to remedy, I just reboot. It got tiring after the 3rd time and I realized it was a bug of some sort. I’m currently running Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Yakkety. Is it unstable or is there some sort of terminal remedy??
I have experienced the same as well (and more so in my previous OS,
XUbuntu). I now have U-Mate (16.04.1 LTS & Mate1.12.1) on our Mac Book
Pro and the WiFi connection itself appears more stable but the app
nm-applet is really flaky. I have 2 users on the system and between
cold boots, restarts, suspends (power management) and just swapping
users this reassuring icon just comes and goes. The actual underlying
WiFi connection appears stable (no complaints from the wife - so far! It
is her preferred system.) However all attempts to make the nm-applet
reliably install itself as a “notification” and be usable, have been
failures. The GUI can be used manually with
nm-connection-editor
but it often came up with 4-5 local WiFi AP’s, but missing the specific
AP that it had been previously connected to, ie the very one I would be
hoping to reconnect to. I found turning “WiFi enable” off and on
sometimes refreshed the list. There is much advice on this area on the
web, to the point where there seems to be many “temporary fixes”, but
the core “permanent solution” has not been found.
Thanks for your reply Rob! I’ve read tons of tutorials and throubleshoots but they mostly lead to dead ends… hopefully this is something that will be resolved in the next stable release!!
Just to add a rather long postscript: If I logon as my wife the
nm-applet is OK, subsequently if I swap users or cold boot to my logon,
nm-applet is OK. If I “suspend” either of us, then only my wife’s cold
boot login re-establishes the nm-applet icon. I end up getting an error
on that app to report, and I have to cold boot as my wife again to get
us back to normal. As she leaves the machine “running”, and I believe
in global warming, I make it suspend to save power, but then the
problems kick in. I have added this in the startup folder for each of us.
Saved as /home/<user>/.config/autostart/nm-applet.desktop and if I give
it “run” level permissions it gets an icon for the file (the wi-fi icon)
and looks good. It seems to help, but is not enough on its own, and I
guess is a hack!
Even so after a ‘suspend’ all bets are off, the nm-applet icon initially
appears greyed out in the notifications bar and quickly disappears. Newbie Alert: I have only been experimenting here and do not offer
this as firm advice, I think it helps the cold boots, but not the resumes.
I have also seen a similar thing on Q/A sites placing code somewhere to
tickle it back from a resume as well. But by then it all seemed so
kludgey I gave up.
Yeah, wifi connections have taken a hit in Ubuntu 16.04 :/.
When something happens you can try the following:
Note: the following commands are typed in a terminal you can open using CTRL+ALT+T, sudo commands require a password, and when you type the password it won't be echoed back to you (no stars) this is normal.
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.servicce
Also you can try "stop" then "start" instead of "restart", sometimes it appears to work better for some reason.
If you notice the issue when coming back from suspend, you can try and reload the wifi driver:
UPDATE: Took a few days to test out a myriad of methods used to fix this problem and none were conclusive (probably too much of a newbie …) Just did a full Mate 16.10 (32) reinstall and bought an Ethernet cable to run throughout the house… works perfectly now (no problems SO FAR). Also try not to suspend the computer as much, just log off or shut down, I feel this may be linked to the problem somehow when it comes to the applet refresh time/driver… could also be completely wrong… Hopefully this gets addressed in the coming updates.
Like Ouroumov mentioned I always restart the NetworkManager service whenever I run into this. This bug was first reported back in 16.04, and has yet to be fixed. In my opinion, if a reliable WiFi connection is important to you, I recommend against Ubuntu MATE. Stable WiFi is not a use-case that Ubuntu is able to match at the moment. I find it deplorable and inexcusable that this bug has yet to be fixed, but it’s not Ubuntu MATE’s fault. We’re just victims at the moment.
Wow! I’ve recently encountered this problem, where sometimes when my Wifi connection drops and reconnects (as shown by the icon in the tray), I can’t really connect to the Internet, e.g. browse the web, play online game.
Your command:
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service
really helps me and things work like a charm now! Just one little thing, there’s a typo: “servicce” -> “service”
hopefully this is something that will be resolved in the next stable release!!
…) Just did a full Mate 16.10 (32) reinstall and bought an Ethernet cable to run throughout the house… works perfectly now (no problems SO FAR). Also try not to suspend the computer as much, just log off or shut down, I feel this may be linked to the problem somehow when it comes to the applet refresh time/driver… could also be completely wrong… Hopefully this gets addressed in the coming updates.