The network center on the Acer Aspire One was not working. Apparently as a power outage corrupted the network settings. This helped:

rm -rf ~/.gconf/system/networking

Then restart the PC and the internet stuff will re-initialise. You have to re-do the wifi stuff, password.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-laptop-and-netbook-25/acer-aspire-one-network-center-not-working-694251/