AllTray

Alltray not hiding windows in Mint 12. Error message in terminal.

Asked by OuTLaWOwnz

I just set up Alltray v0.7.5.1dev on Mint 12 (Mate desktop). I've tested it on a few different applications and it creates a tray icon fine but the application window is still visible. If I try from the terminal I see Alltray loads but at the point where the programs window appears I get an error message.
For example, if I type:

alltray "teamviewer" &

A tray icon will appear but the Teamviewer window loads visible and I get the error:

** (alltray:2754): CRITICAL **: all_tray_ctt_attach: assertion 'self != NULL' failed

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? It seems to happen with all apps I try.

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Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch) said : 		#1

What does Mint 12 use for a desktop environment, and have they modified it any from upstream/stock?

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OuTLaWOwnz (outlawownz) said : 		#2

I'm fairly new to Linux in general so I don't know a lot of the details of how Mint 12 is set up. I know it uses Gnome 3 but I switched it to the Mate desktop (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MATE) which looks like the old Mint 11 desktop. I'll test it with the environment set back to Gnome 3 and see what happens.

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Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch) said : 		#3

It would appear that the MATE desktop is a fork of GNOME 2, and under somewhat heavy development. Assuming that it continues to use the software that is GNOME panel and Metacity, AllTray should function under that environment just fine. However, I do not have such an environment installed, and if there are problems with it, I will certainly need more information (and probably filed in a bug report over at GitHub - see https://github.com/mbt/alltray/issues to report an issue against AllTray if necessary, and be sure to include versions for the components that AllTray relies on, specificially the panel and the window manager).

AllTray does not at this time work with GNOME 3, and I'm not actually certain that it ever will. The usage model for the GNOME 3 desktop is already quite adept at getting windows out of your way, and AllTray is somewhat pointless on GNOME 3. Additionally, since the system tray ("notification area", as GNOME called it) is gone in GNOME 3, the only way that AllTray could support GNOME 3 is to become a single-instance application and have a plugin written that links it with GNOME 3's shell directly. So, not only does the usage model of GNOME 3 more or less obsolete AllTray, it would be a painful process to port it as I understand the way things need to be done.

I would recommend switching to GNOME 3 purely. Any fork of GNOME 2 is going to wind up becoming unstable over time, as there simply are not enough people there to do development on it. Much like forks of GNOME 1.x terminated not long after they started, I think that will also be the case for G NOME 2.x.

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Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch) said : 		#4

Additionally, I would like clarification; when you click the tray icon, does the window go away? New AllTray doesn't hide the application by default, because most users expected that when they started an application, they could use it until they wanted to hide it. There is now a -H (--hide) option that tells AllTray to hide the application once started up.

Since so much has changed since the previous series, you may wish to read AllTray's man page; just type "man alltray" in a terminal window.

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