What network menu?

Support & Help Requests
#1

I’m trying to connect to my parents’ wireless network. I keep thinking there must be some simple menu that lists all the wireless networks in the area. Darned if I can find any such thing. The best I’ve been able to do is list the found networks using iwlist -scan, then manually enter the rents’ network info into the Network Connections application. I still can’t figure out how to actually connect to that network.

On line instructions for connecting to wireless networks start by saying “Click the network menu in the menu bar”. I just don’t see any such menu. I know that my computer is set up for wireless… I connect at work all the time. But someone else set that up for me.

Ok, so basically I’m clueless. Here are the details of my system:

Ubuntu 16.10
Codename yakkety

#2

Welcome to the forum,

The network menu should be located on the right side of the top panel, and looks like this

If the network menu is not there, Network Manager may not be running. To start it up again:

Press Alt+F2

Type nm-applet and press Enter.

The Wireless Network Authentication box may pop up. If so enter your password in the appropriate box and click Connect.

To see a list of available networks and options, click (or right click) the network menu in the top panel.

1 Like
#3

I found the answer (or at least one answer). The network menu is located in the notification applet. By default that applet is in the upper right corner, but if you’ve deleted it (as I apparently did) then you have no such menu. A search for a wireless applet returns nothing, and the network applet isn’t very helpful for listing wireless networks. BTW, this is also why I gave up trying to find a “volume” or “sound” applet to show the volume icon… it wasn’t exactly intuitive that to have a volume icon I needed to search for “notifications”.

I’d like to submit that this problem could be easily solved by simply adding a few keywords to the notifications applet description, something like this:

“Typically includes icons for network, volume, and bluetooth”.

2 Likes
#4

This is all true. Glad you got it going. If your satisfied with your solution, please mark this as solved.

#5

I think this is a good idea and you may want to suggest it here: