Today I replaced my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop with Debian Squeeze (frozen testing). Installation went smooth, beside two small problems. I could not select Danish locale. I had to select ‘C’ as locale, and later on select DK keyboard layout. I also ended up with two kernels installed. The first would not boot (called -trunk), but removing it fixed that problem.
All fine from here I started configuring my desktop. This is mostly my email, so no big deal I thought. After adding my email accounts to Evolution it never refreshed the accounts and told me that it was working ‘offline’. Strange.. dropbox was working and I had all the network access I wanted elsewhere. Initially I thought that it could be an Evolution bug until I noticed the same problem with Empathy. Hmmm… The network-manager icon was grayed out and there was no connections configured, which I thought would be okay. But apparently some apps uses the network status from network-manager to determine online/offline mode.
I had to comment out the eth0 lines from /etc/network/interfaces and run ‘/etc/init.d/network-manager restart‘ before the connection was detected. And suddenly both apps went online :)