I’m not tech savvy (as will be demonstrated in a moment) but I’ve been running Ubuntu MATE on my primary everyday machine - a Samsung N220 netbook - for about a year (single partition, only one OS, clean installation, previously running Trusty) and it worked just fine. Here’s some basic system info:
Release 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) 64-bit
Kernel Linux 4.4.0-71-generic x86_64
MATE 1.12.1
Memory: 982,0 MiB
Processor: Intel® Atom™ CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz × 2
[HISTORY] A couple nights ago, I noticed a warning icon from the update manager in the top bar, urging me to run $ SUDO APT-GET INSTALL -F in order to fix some broken dependencies or whatever, which I immediately did. In the output from apt-get I noticed a suggestion to run $ SUDO APT AUTOREMOVE in order to clean up some unnecessary stuff, which I did (possibly a terrible decision - I was quite sleepy at the time). I have no idea whether doing so is the cause of my problem, but that’s the only unusual thing I’ve done with my computer in a while.
[PROBLEM] Starting the next day, when I switched the netbook on, I noticed it couldn’t access the Internet via Wi-fi. Firefox will only load cached pages and PINGing google doesn’t return any output at all. I can’t even access my own router config page by typing its local address into Firefox, as I used to do: no data seems to get back to the computer from the outside world at all.
[NOTE] The problem only occurs when trying to access the wireless network. I’m currently plugged into the router via wire and everything’s working as it should.
[NOTE] The problem doesn’t seem to be with the router, as all other devices are still working normally with the Wi-fi, including another laptop also running Ubuntu MATE. Only this one computer (the one I’ve tampered with running apt-get and apt autoremove) is experiencing problems.
Can you smart, sexy, tech-savvy people help me out?