AllTray

How to tray a java application with AllTray?

Asked by Alessandro De Carli

Hello,

I'm running fluxbox as my default WM, AllTray works great for firefox but I can't get it working with a java application (*.jar). To be more specific I'm trying to put BitThief to a tray, is this possible with AllTray? I found several howto's in ubuntu forums that suggest to first use the "-i" option but in my release of AllTray there is no such option (0.74). My distribution is gentoo and I complied AllTray without the gnome option. Is there any workaround?

Best Regards

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Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch) said : 		#1

In short: there is a bug in Java that prohibits AllTray from properly working with it. Newer versions of AllTray do not work on a window-by-window basis, they work on an application-by-application basis; now you dock an entire application instead of just a single window from an application. However, Java applications do not honor the conventions that are supposed to be used in order to detect a whole application.

If you're interested, here is the technical reason: Java software does not set its process ID on its windows as it should. Without that piece of information, it is difficult to find a method of managing it. If I knew more about what was going on with Java these days, I'd file a bug, but I don't have a clue who to file the bug with, or even if the bug exists in all implementations of Java or just the Sun/Oracle versions.

If Java applications set their window IDs, though, they would be able to be managed by AllTray. That much I can say for certain.

OpenOffice.org used to have the same problem, but it seems that at some point, that bug was fixed.

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