Linux – How to minimize Evolution to the system tray in Ubuntu

emailevolutionlinuxUbuntu

In Ubuntu some applications can be set to minimize instead of exit on close. For example, Empathy minimizes to the system tray (mail icon) when the close button is pressed in the application window. How do I make Evolution do this as well?

Essentially I would like to have Evolution hidden in the system tray instead of having to re-launch it every ten minutes to check for new messages (or leave it open and clutter the taskbar).

Best Answer

This plugin allows "closing" or minimizing Evolution to the mail indicator (tray) in a native way.

Actually, it simply minimizes Evolution and hides it from the pager to behave as “closed”,
the same as the other programs do. (Empathy, Gwibber, ...) To install it:

  1. Download the last version of the plugin (for example, evolution-tray-0.0.8.tar.gz).
  2. Once downloaded, open it and extract its contents.
  3. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and cd to the plugin's folder.

  4. Install its dependencies by executing:

    sudo apt-get install evolution-dev
sudo apt-get install intltool

  5. Run ./configure

  6. If the above didn't give errors, run  make

  7. Finally, install the plugin by running:

    sudo make install

Enjoy!

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