3d ago

Upgraded to debian 13.0 from 12.11 and now unit NetworkManager.service could not be found. How do I install a network manager now?

I edited the new debian.sources file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d according to debian instructions, started to upgrade and successfuly upgraded to 13.0, at least core debian (can use mpv, vlc, thunar, libreoffice...)

Problem is, this notebook with debian 13.0 doesnt have a working network manager and there are still 900 packages that need upgrading.

The command I entered in the terminal: sudo systemctl status NetworkManager.service returns: unit NetworkManager.service could not be found.

I have an android phone I thought I could use as a network hotspot or maybe tether, but debian 13.0 doesnt recognize it, so I really dont know what to do

Lan cable didnt work either.

Help appreciated

ETA: THANK YOU GUYS FOR YOUR AWESOME HELP!!!

special thanks to InnerScientist and stuner for their approach but what worked was what IHave69XiBucks proposed.

23 comments

This is interesting. I updated my laptop and had a network issue as well, but mine was different - it wanted to use dnsmasq, which I don't need (being an end-point, not a server), and dnsmasq wasn't picking up the dns from dhcp.
Solution turned out to be to disable dnsmasq using systemctl and reboot.
Case sensitivity may be the problem. Try systemctl status NetworkManager
- Sorry, corrected it. Results didnt change
- Almost certainly this.
  Type nmcli, if it does anything but complain that it can't find that command, you have NetworkManager installed
  
  nmcli returns command not found
  sudo systemctl status NetworkManager.service returns: unit NetworkManager.service could not be found.
  Seems I dont have that one either
Could you edit your post to include the solution for anyone else with the same issue coming across this post in the future?
but what worked was what IHave69XiBucks proposed.
Why do I not see his comment?
- Your Lemmy instance blocks the lemmygrad instance where IHave69XiBucks resides. My instance does too.
  
  I'm so sneaky u cant see me 😜 I am the spectre of communism haunting you
  
  Ah, that explains. Thanks.
That sounds pretty bad and probably means other things are broken too. The easiest option would probably be a reinstall at this point, but if you want to learn something you can also try to salvage your install.
To recover, it's probably easiest to manually configure your Ethernet connection as described by InnerScientist and then re-install the network-manager package.
You can check the status of the network-manager package using dpgk. It should look like this (ii at the start, but it sounds like it's not installed in your case):

$ dpkg -l | grep -i network-manager ii network-manager 1.52.1-1 amd64 network management framework (daemon and userspace tools) ii network-manager-l10n 1.52.1-1 all network management framework (translation files)
You can also check /var/log/apt/history.log to see what went wrong and if there are other things you need to fix.
I performed the upgrade in two steps apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs and apt full-upgrade (based on the release notes). I can see the following on the line Upgrade: for the command apt full-upgrade:

network-manager:amd64 (1.42.4-1+deb12u1, 1.52.1-1)
On the Remove: line you can see the packages that were removed. Unfortunately, the names of many libraries were changed in this release (e.g., libreadline8:amd64 to libreadline8t64:amd64), so there's a lot of noise in there. Maybe you can look at that line and ignore everything that starts with lib to see if any other important packages were removed.
Connect a lan cable and:
None

ip a (shows network interfaces and ips ip a a 192.168.<subnet>.<unused ip>/24 dev <interface> (get the subnet from your router or phone WiFi settings, interface is the interface starting with "en" from the first command, for unused ip just try your phone IP +1) ip r a default via <router IP> (router IP can be seen in your phones WiFi settings under gateway)
Also checkout /etc/resolv.conf, replace its content with "nameserver 8.8.8.8"
- For reference, those letters are just short for, respectively
  
  address address add route add
  
  Thanks for that
Im confused about how you did a partial upgrade? Did you run full-upgrade or just upgrade? When i did it it did the entire thing in one go.
- I used sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
  
  Yeah for like a normal update youd do just upgrade but for a full version upgrade you should be running full-upgrade. It gets rid of conflicts, and goes deeper than the normal upgrade. Just for future reference.
- It is possible you have downloaded the new network manager package but not installed it. I would try to run
  sudo apt --fix-broken install sudo apt full-upgrade
  and see if it can install anything that is pre-downloaded. This may fix your network issues. If not it'll be a much more annoying fix.
  
  No luck
Bring up networking manually?
Or just back up your files and reinstall.

23 comments