Re: KDE system tray - erratic behaviour

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer@icfo.es>]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 09:55:14 +0000, Ken Heard wrote:
>  The system tray on the KDE panel does not display icons for some of the 
>  applications I designate in the KDE menu editor to be displayed there. For 
>  instance, I want Kjots and Knotes icons to be in the system tray and so 
>  indicated in the KDE menu; but they do not appear.
> 
>  Another example: the adept-notifier package is supposed to show an icon in 
>  the system tray on log in by any user if there are packages to be upgraded.  
>  For one user the system tray icon display was inadvertently removed.  That 
>  user wants it back, but I was unable to do so.
> 
>  Are these KDE bugs (one or two of many, in my experience); or is it just me? 
>   If the former, should I report them to KDE?  If the latter, I would 
>  appreciate advice as to what I should do about them.

I think the "Place in system tray" setting in the KDE menu editor
determines if the program opens a window when you start it or whether it
just silently places its icon in the system tray. Checking this option
does not make the icon appear in the system tray right away (at least in
my experience). You still have to start the application yourself.

The system tray should simply keep its icons from session to session,
i.e. if you have some icons in the system tray when you log out they
should appear again when you log in the next time. To get the knotes
icon permanently in the system tray, all I had to do was start knotes
once. The icon should remain in the system tray until you right-click it
and select "Quit". For some applications you will then be asked if they
should be started again automatically the next time KDE is launched
again; this has nothing to do with the "system tray" checkbox in the KDE
menu editor as far as I understand it. (I have to admit that this is
confusing.)

The only problem I have with some of the icons in the system tray is
that they sometimes do not come up due to, I suppose, some sort of race
condition at the start of KDE. That can be fixed by killing the
corresponding application and staring it again, e.g.

pkill korn; korn

(I have this problem only very rarely now with KDE 3.5.6; it was worse
 with earlier versions, especially 3.5.5. You can use a short script in
 ~/.kde/Autostart to automate the kill/restart workaround for the
 problematic applications.)

-- 
Regards,
          Florian