You may have observed that the default ‘network manager’ in Linux Mint fails to reconnect to a dropped Wi-Fi hotspot after prolonged use (e.g. It you are connected to a Wi-Fi hot spot for more than 24 Hrs, and the connection drops for some reason, ‘network manager’ does not reconnect to it and keeps asking for network password and does not connect even after you have supplied the password).

This happens due to a bug in ‘network manager’ which does not allow the Wi-Fi interface to come up. The solution to this is to dump ‘network manager’ altogether and use ‘wicd’, which is an alternate network utility used to manage LAN and Wi-Fi connections. Follow the following steps for installing ‘wicd’:

1. Issue the following command at the terminal-

sudo apt-get install wicd

Enter user password when prompted. Enter ‘y’ to confirm the installation after required package list is displayed.

2. After ‘wicd’ packages have been downloaded, a ‘Package configuration’ wizard will start in the terminal. Press space key to select your username(s) which will be added to the ‘netdev’ group. Users of ‘netdev’ group are allowed to run ‘wicd’ client.

Press tab key to highlight ‘<OK>’ and then press space key.

3. Setup will now be completed. If you get an error saying that it failed to start the network connection manager ‘wicd’, then you can ignore it at this time as we have to carry out few more steps.

4. Now issue the following command at the terminal-

sudo apt-get remove network-manager

Enter user password when prompted. Enter ‘y’ to confirm the removal.

Reboot your system when done.

5. After the reboot, you will see a black ‘wicd’ network icon in the system tray instead of the green ‘network-manager’ network icon.

6. Double click the network icon to open the ‘wicd’ connection manager. Press ‘Refresh’ to view list of available networks.

After networks are found, press ‘Properties’ to manage the properties of the network.

Click ‘OK’ when done and connect to your Wi-Fi network without any reconnection problems.