[Solved] cannot add icons to system tray

[jiml8]

There are any number of applications that place an icon in the system tray when they open. These include VMWare Workstation, qt-recordmydesktop, gtk-recordmydesktop, and gapcmon among many others.

None of the ones I have identified here are able to place their icons in the system tray with mga6 running plasma. This makes them unusable; the only way to interact with them typically is through that icon. Well...this is not true of vmware workstation of course, but it is true of the others.

I have hunted and have not identified a setting that would let me do this but it seems to me there must be one someplace - or else there is some important functionality missing in this version of the system tray.

So, how do I get system tray to allow random programs to put an icon in there?

[doktor5000]

That is done via xembed-sni-proxy, I believe the binary is called xembedsniproxy.
Maybe have a look for recent bugreports as https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20397

Although I personally haven't encountered any issues with the systray yet, and there are quite a few nonstandard icons here like for telegram, discord, dropbox and also transmission as some GTK ones.
When I'm back at my Mageia box I can take a look for qt-recordmydesktop and gtk-recordmydesktop

[jiml8]

Pidgin and vidalia also cannot put their icons in systray. Seems like only the defined KDE apps can use this tray.

[doktor5000]

Nope, as mentioned I've got quite a few GTK icons there so either something is missing on your box or there's some kind of configuration issue.

[jiml8]

Well, I invoked xembedsniproxy from a shell...and my icons popped into place.

So, I killed it, then started it using the alt-f2 task launcher and I now have all my icons.

I have no idea why this isn't starting with plasma, but if I log this session out now (thus storing my settings) it should be available henceforth when I start.

Thanks.

[doktor5000]

You're welcome.

Would still be interesting why it wasn't running in the first place. Is that with a fresh /home or did you migrate over some or maybe all your older settings?
And can you reproduce it with a freshly created user?

[jiml8]

I did an online upgrade, from a console window (GUI was disabled), per the recommendations in the wiki.

Although I wanted to keep my settings, in fact I lost most of the settings associated with KDE. I did keep some of my kmail settings, notably my POP and IMAP accounts, though my SMTP accounts were lost. Most other settings were lost, and in fact I had to separately install a number of packages that did not get picked up in the upgrade. Notable in this list was amarok vlc, pidgin, kate, vidalia. There were others but I don't recall offhand.

I think some of my problems had to do with the fact that I had samba blacklisted from upgrading (I long ago moved to samba 4 for security reasons, and Mageia 5 was still on Samba 3) and I neglected to remove the blacklist entry before upgrading. Turns out that blacklist applies even on a distro upgrade.

While I DID sort that out, it did cause me to have a less than smooth experience with the upgrade.

My upgrade ran some 4300 packages initially, and along the way it loaded a number of others...and, of course, I had to manually intervene and load some specifically. Overall was some 4500-4600 packages...definitely a big upgrade.