On an f8 laptop with a complete reinstall, except for /home (so there could be old gnome stuff lying around to cause this). Logging in as root my networks come up. Logging in as a normal user, I don't see my network manger thingie, and no networks. Workaround is to login as root and then switch to a normal user.
Do you mean 'nm-applet' only works as root? Sounds odd; because I've done a bunch of fresh installs of F-8 and haven't had problems with other users. When you log in directly as a non-root user, can you run '/usr/bin/nm-tool' and provide the output? Can you also see if there's anything related to nm-applet in ~/.xsession-errors? Are you using SELinux in enforcing mode?
Created attachment 287541 [details] nm-tool output (slightly edited)
On my fc5 box, when I logged in, the (I guess it's called) nm-applet automatically appeared and then proceeded to connect. With f8, I'm finding that only works with root. As a normal user I don't see that applet and my network connections aren't started. Output from nm-tool is attached. I turned off SELinux (another story).
Here's some more (after a re-boot). Seems nm-applet is running, just not visible: $ cat .xsession-errors SESSION_MANAGER=local/unix:@/tmp/.ICE-unix/2421,unix/unix:/tmp/.ICE-unix/2421 ** (gnome-session:2421): WARNING **: Host name lookup failure on localhost. Window manager warning: Failed to read saved session file /home/cagney/.metacity/sessions/default1.ms: Failed to open file '/home/cagney/.metacity/sessions/default1.ms': No such file or directory 11 could not attach to desktop process --------------- $ nm-applet ** (nm-applet:2977): WARNING **: <WARN> applet_dbus_manager_start_service(): Could not acquire the NetworkManagerUserSettings service as it is already taken. Return: 3 (nm-applet:2977): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_hash_table_destroy: assertion `hash_table != NULL' failed (nm-applet:2977): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed (nm-applet:2977): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed ------------------ $ ps auxw | grep nm-applet cagney 2532 0.0 0.7 28184 9940 ? S 11:26 0:00 nm-applet --sm-disable
Ok, so it looks like you're running two applets. Can you check to see whether there are two applet running as your user? Can you also report what their command lines are?
$ ps auxwww | grep nm-applet cagney 2464 0.0 0.0 4044 672 pts/4 S+ 12:53 0:00 grep nm-applet cagney 2532 0.0 0.8 47820 10588 ? S 11:26 0:01 nm-applet --sm-disable this is the only running nm-applet (I'm guessing it was started when I logged in). Trying to run a second from the command line (as nm-applet) gets above error.
Found it; I lost my egg tray again :-/