How can I connect to the internet from the console? (Removed network manager and now can't log in or connect to internet)

Question

I have a Lenovo thinkpad 13 laptop running Linux mint 18. After a recent update it stopped logging in to my university network (still worked at home). Someone suggested that I remove network manager from my system and try wicd. But when I did that and rebooted, there is a problem with xsession and it keeps saying "your session lasted less than 10 seconds...etc"

This has happened before on my old laptop when doing something else and the solution was to just type:

sudo apt-get install cinnamon

However, my problem now is that I have no internet connection so I cannot reinstall cinnamon. My laptop has no dedicated ethernet port so I can't plug directly to the router, however I have been able to usb tether from my phone in the past.

Is there a way of connecting via my USB phone tethering so that I can reinstall cinnamon and log back in to mint? Or failing that, is there a way I can install the cinnamon package from a USB drive?

I think my wifi might still be available too. When I type iwconfig, the result is:

enp0s31f6     no wireless extensions

lo            no wireless extensions

wlp3s0        IEEE 802.11abgn  ESSID:off/any
              Mode: Managed Access Point: Not-Associated  Tx-Power=0 dBm
              Retry short limit: 7  RTS thr:off  Fragment thr:off
              Power Management:on

Answer 1

I managed to work it out, so thought I would share what I did in case anyone else had a similar problem. I found a cached version of network manager in /var/cache/apt/archives/ and reinstalled that using dpkg and then apt-get install -f, and that let me connect to the internet to reinstall cinnamon.

Phew!