Comment 67 for bug 284596

I hit this bug again in the following situation: a customer requested individual desktops to be setup for Internet access and general web/text editing tasks. We setup one admin user and one regular user and only gave credentials for the regular user. When using the (second) regular user, NM is nowhere to be found and network connectivity is that much harder to configure.

This is with 10.10, we used this workaround:

1) Physically connect to a wired connection
2) Obtain a DHCP lease (sudo dhclient from command line, in Applications > Accessories > Terminal)
3) sudo apt-get update
4) sudo apt-get install wicd

Also make sure the second user has appropriate rights (under System > Administration > Users and Groups > Click user > Advanced settings > User privileges ).

WICD acts as a replacement of network manager. To read more about it **and how to use it**, see:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WICD