Andrea Olivato’s Blog

I really liked the new Ubuntu notification system so I decided to install it on Gentoo too.

At first I found this overlay but it’s not updated and fails to download packages. Then I decided to compile it myself and found the process terribly easy… Here’re my steps

Download

Notify-osd is hosted on launchpad , and got lots of releases. I found that latest ones failed to compile on my environment so I chose the 0.9.12.

cd /opt/
sudo wget http://launchpad.net/notify-osd/0.9/0.9.12/+download/notify-osd-0.9.12.tar.gz
sudo tar xvf notify-osd-0.9.12.tar.gz
sudo rm -f notify-osd-0.9.12.tar.gz
sudo mv notify-osd-0.9.12/ notify-osd/
sudo chown -R ${USER}:${USER} notify-osd/
cd  notify-osd/

Installation

I preferred not installing on common folders but keeping everything under /opt instead. So no make install this time.

./configure
make

Quick Test

To check everything went fine let’s try killing the common daemon and use the new one instead.

killall notification-daemon 
/opt/notify-osd/src/notify-osd

I got a bunch of glib warning but I didn’t care so much. Now let’s try a notification (you might need to emerge x11-libs/libnotify if you don’t have it):

notify-send 'hello gentoo'

There it is! A cool black bubble on the top-right of the screen…

System start

Obviously as I wanted to install it I don’t want to start it manually so let’s do something to make everything automatic on gnome start. This blog was my source for this step.

First of all let’s create the script needed to kill the notification daemon and start the new one.

touch /opt/notify-osd/startup.sh
chmod +x /opt/notify-osd/startup.sh
$EDITOR /opt/notify-osd/startup.sh

Paste these lines inside the file

#!/bin/bash
killall notification-daemon
sleep 1
/opt/notify-osd/src/notify-osd

Now let’s create the startup script. On Gnome they live under .config/autostart/ on every user’s home. So…

$EDITOR ~/.config/autostart/notify-osd.desktop

And paste following code

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=notify-osd
Exec=/opt/notify-osd/startup.sh
Icon=system-run
Comment=
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

Ok I’m done! Next X reboot we got our brand new notification daemon up&running

Finishes

I had some bad visual effects with Evolution and mail-notification panel applet, opening gtk dialogs instead of using the notificaitons.

I disabled Evolution messages (kept the icon) just setting it from Edit -> plugins -> Notifications. Disabled everything but show icon.

Mail notification can use the new notifications but has to be set up from gconf-editor. Navigate in apps -> mail notification -> popups -> double click on actions and delete all.