Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has a nice notification system called Ayatana. The notification system of KDE is ugly in my opinion, so I like Ayatana very. It is very beautiful, and it is more beautiful if the desktop effects are enabled. Ayatana is a Canonical-community joint effort to discuss and promote improvements to the Ubuntu user interface. See this link for more information.
However Ayatana is not part of Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, because it was a patch for KDE. If you liked Ayatana, and use Lucid Lynx, then take a look at the Colibri. It can be installed from the repositories, and has the same functionality like Ayatana. Currently only the position of the notifications can be changed, and not all notifications will use Colibri, for example the file transfers. Before you start using Colibri, some preparations must be made: uncheck the “Application notifications” in the System Trey Settings dialog box. After then check that the
/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service
contains the Exec=/usr/bin/colibri line. At last you have to configure KDE to start Colibri at login time via System Settings → Advanced → Autostart module, just add /usr/bin/colibri and you are ready. Here is a picture about Colibri (click on it for bigger size):
If the colibri project is used, then some important parts of KDE that relays they interface to the notification may not work, so be careful. That notifications doesn’t follow the standard free-desktop specification.
Nice, but I could not figure out how to look for past notifications. Is there a tray icon or sth similar?
Right click on the System Tray, and choose System Tray Settings, there you can find what for you looking.
The Ubuntu notifier is called notify-osd. Ayatana is a Canonical-community joint effort to discuss and promote improvements to the Ubuntu user interface.
See https://launchpad.net/ayatana for more info.
Can you update your post to reflect that information? I wouldn’t want people to start referring to notify-osd (one of the early efforts of the Ayatana group) as something else.
Thanks,
Ryan
Thank you, I have updated the post.
Pretty, and pretty useless too
Really a great tutorial, I really love this way of notification in my desktop.
Thank You!
where to put colibri in:
[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
Exec=/bin/sh -c ‘if [ ! -x /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon ] || [ “${GDMSESSION%.desktop}” = gnome ] || [ “${GDMSESSION%.desktop}” = guest-restricted ] || [ “${GDMSESSION%.desktop}” = default -a “$(basename `readlink /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager`)” = gnome-session ]; then exec /usr/lib/notify-osd/notify-osd; else exec /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon; fi’
which is better ? ayatana @ colibri 🙂 ?
I used both Ayatana and the KDE one and its a who cares?
Now you want me to try a third one? Colibri? The things I love about free software is often the thigns I hate about it too.
I use the KDE desktop, it works beautifully and this isnt really that important.
#1: If you want to bitch and actually be respected, use a real name.
#2: Why flame? If you don’t want it, don’t use it.
#3: If you had read the article, you’d know Colibri basically IS Ayatana.