problems about trayicon autostart in GNOME

[Stanislav Brabec]

David Lee wrote:
> problems about trayicon autostart in GNOME:
> 
> I write a .desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart/, for auto-starting 
> an application with trayicon.But my application always starts before 
> 
> 
> the GNOME notification area applet, so the trayicon of my application 
> can not embedded in the notification area correctly. 

You probably use bad systray code (many applications do it, try "killall
gnome-panel to see, what happens"). Correct implementation should wait
for tray icon area appearing and then display its own icon. In case of
tray area disappearing (e. g. gnome-panel crash, configuration change)
it must react, too and offer alternative access method (if required) and
again re appear in tray, if systray appears again.

But it is more appropriate to discuss it in GNOME lists. I guess that
simple API with complete (e. g. wait for appearing, re-appear after
panel restart,...) support of systray would be nice. Currently one have
to pick, modify and update libegg code.

> In SUSE SLED 10, the notification-area-applet is loaded as "shlib" 
> instead of "exe"(I found this at 
> 
> 
> /opt/gnome/lib/bonobo/servers/GNOME_NotificationAreaApplet.server).
> It is not displayed in the process lists, so I don't know how to 
> judge if the notification-area-applet is loaded.
> 
> Is there any way to know exactly at what time the 
> 
> notification-area-applet.so 
> in GNOME is loaded when logging in ?
> Is there any way to control the autostart order in GNOME?

SuSE Linux has patches, which converts some stand-alone applets to
in-process applets. It saves some memory and initialization time. These
applets don't have its own process.

The in-process applet API is an upstream feature.

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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