Linux mint (KDE) network manager inactive

One of my lab vmware vm's running mint 18.2 KDE version recently lost all network connectivity.  Usually I suspend the machine everytime I'm powering off the host to keep all my applications and tools in the same state that I left this.  This time when restoring it, it went through a normal OS bootup.  After logging in, the network manager tray icon was showing no connections and a status of Inactive, with the tray icon colored red.  Checking the dmesg log, it showed an ens## device being renamed to eth0 with the correct driver.  "lshw -C network" showed  the device in a disabled state.  lsmod showed everything loaded.  Trying to create new virtual nic's didn't do anything.  I changed the vmx file to use vmxnet3 instead of e1000, changed grub to not use all these ens## device id's for the network card and a few other possible fixes for udev and other stuff, but nothing worked.  Eventually I stumbled on a post that suggested looking at /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state.  The option NetworkingEnabled was set to false.  I edited that true, restarted network-manager service and everything came back to life.  I suspect there were some patches and probably kernel updates between my last suspend of the vm and this boot up, so perhaps that triggered something in the OS.  Either way it was several hours wasted.

Vmware module compile failure on kernel 2.6.34.x

I recently went through a distro update for OpenSuSE (11.1 to 11.3) on my home computer, which among the normal things that get broken in this process, VMware was among the usual suspects. Every time there is a kernel update VMware needs to recompile its modules. Typically this is a simple process, but in this case Vmware v7.0.x was failing to recompile its modules on kernel 2.6.34.7-0.7 with a missing header error. With all the appropriate packages installed, I had to go through the google method of finding wild ideas for a fix. I tried a few with no success. To avoid the userland patches to vmware, I just downloaded the latest VMware version and ran through the install. This apparently is an easy fix. So if anyone is still stuck in this mess, try an update.

If I can ever figure out the mystery of the many sound systems in Linux and why they are working, then not working at any given time, this would also make life much easier :).