Notify-send/notification-daemon: disable tray icon

libnotifylxdenotificationsopenboxpanel

When I use notify-send to send a simple message to notification-daemon:

notify-send "hello"

it not only displays the message but also creates a system tray icon, as shown on the screenshot below:

enter image description here

This icon will stay in the system tray until I click on it and select "clear all notifications". This icon completely defeats the purpose of notify-send as unobtrusive notification. I have used notify-send few years ago and I am sure it did not have any tray icon back than. Needles to say, this is absolutely annoying.

I have found that I can use transient option

notify-send --hint=int:transient:1 hello

Which makes the icon disappear after a certain time. This is better, but still not acceptable.

Is there any way to get rid of the tray icon entirely?

I am using LXDE on Debian Wheezy

Some answers suggest, this is caused by my desktop environment (LXDE).

I find it hard to believe. I still suspect this is caused by notification daemon. I have downloaded sources for notification-daemon package, and there in the CHANGELOG I see, among other things:

Added better support for attaching context notifications to an icon on
the system tray, even when it moves. Patch by Colin Walters.

Which seems to be the "feature" that I am complaining about.

Can anybody advice how to disable systray notification in notification-daemon? When I grep the sources for tray or systray, I don't find anything. I don't know where to start.

Best Answer

As far as I can tell, you are right in attributing the system tray icon to notification-daemon. If you are not happy with the icon, try another notification daemon. Notifications work on the basis of client/server. Any notification client can communicate with any compatible server.

I myself am using dunst and I am very happy with that. It does not have any system tray notification.

There are several notification daemons, notification-daemon being only one of them. In Debian, you can list them with following command:

$ apt-cache search notification | grep daemon | grep notification
dunst - minimalistic notification daemon
inosync - notification-based directory synchronization daemon
notification-daemon - daemon for displaying passive pop-up notifications
notify-osd - daemon that displays passive pop-up notifications
xfce4-notifyd - simple, visually-appealing notification daemon for Xfce

I can recommend dunst. It is a minimalistic, yet highly configurable notification daemon.

Related Solutions

Linux – Notifications and notification daemon not working on window manager

Finally I solved problem myself.

I will leave instructions what I did.

The problem consists of two parts:

Dbus cannot be accessed from within windows manager
Notification daemon cannot get messages from dbus

1st problem solution:

Real problem was, that my windows manager was run from lxdm, which for some reason does not merges config files from /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d except for lxde session (in LXDE dbus works, in awesome wm doesn't). In this folder exists file named 30-dbus with following content:

#!/bin/bash

# launches a session dbus instance
if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ] && type dbus-launch >/dev/null; then
  eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session)
fi

This part of the code defines $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS variable which defines a dbus port to use for various applications. echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS can be used as simple sanity check to see if dbus session exists (it should return dbus session file).

Config files from this folder can be merged with simple shell script on session start(code taken from .xinitrc):

#!/bin/bash

if [ -d /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d ]; then
  for f in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/*; do
    [ -x "$f" ] && . "$f"
  done
  unset f
fi

2nd problem solution:

While dbus running and is available to other programs it still needs more access for notifications to work properly, so I needed to run polkit agent, because Awesome WM does not have one. I had chosen lxpolkit, because I already had almost full lxde environment. In my case, just added to my ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua file: awful.util.spawn_with_shell("dex /etc/xdg/autostart/lxpolkit.desktop") , for some reason without this line it refused to start by default with lxdm.

I think gnome polkit agent should work fine too.

Shell – Using notify-send with Cron

You need to set the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS variable. By default cron does not have access to the variable. To remedy this put the following script somewhere and call it when the user logs in, for example using awesome and the run_once function mentioned on the wiki. Any method will do, since it does not harm if the function is called more often than required.

#!/bin/sh

touch $HOME/.dbus/Xdbus
chmod 600 $HOME/.dbus/Xdbus
env | grep DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS > $HOME/.dbus/Xdbus
echo 'export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS' >> $HOME/.dbus/Xdbus

exit 0

This creates a file containing the required Dbus evironment variable. Then in the script called by cron you import the variable by sourcing the script:

if [ -r "$HOME/.dbus/Xdbus" ]; then
  . "$HOME/.dbus/Xdbus"
fi

Here is an answer that uses the same mechanism.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Notifications and notification daemon not working on window manager

Shell – Using notify-send with Cron

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