wnd's weblog

Adventure of running a system tray on a setup without actual desktop environment such as KDE, or GNOME. It is doable, but not necessarily a breeze. Give stalonetray a go.

Some time ago I accidentally discovered Ktray. To quote the website: “KTray is a system tray which holds dock icons of any application. It is independent from the kde kicker and so it can be used with any window manager.” As a die hard user of Fvwm2, I didn’t know what to think. Basically I never liked the idea of having unnecessary clutter on the screen, but I also acknowledged that system trays actually did serve a purpose. Not often, but it did. With this thought I left the page open in my browser until I could look further into it.

About two week ago I found myself trying to compile Ktray for my installation of Debian. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and I was supposed to go to work. However the compiling didn’t go too well – in fact, I couldn’t even run the configure-script successfully. configure.ac (or maybe it was configure.in) wasn’t very helpful as it was looking for KDE libraries using KDE-macro instead of pkg-config. I tried installing several development packages for KDE and QT, but nothing would help. Finally, I closed the tab in my browser, deleted my work directory, and left to work. I was a little upset about this, and wondered, if I should try to create a similar application, but for KDE and Gnome.

This morning, for some reason, I remembered my earlier experience with Ktray. I opened my start page in a browser, and typed in a search for “kde tray stand-alone”. The second hit I got was stalonetray. First of all, stalonetray is a live project. Unlike Ktray, is has been updated this year, and not just two years ago. Second, it would also support freedesktop.org system tray, which obviously includes Gnome system tray. This would be exactly what I was thinking of. On top of everything else, stalonetray is already included in Debian unstable.

However things never go that smoothly. While stalonetray does pretty much what it promises, it’s not perfect. I want to run stalonetray swallowed in FvwmButtons, which I have set up to also include FvwmPager, xclock, and xbiff. Stalonetray grows bigger to accommodate more icons. I don’t want my FvwnButtons to grow bigger. See the conflict? There appears to be no option in stalonetray to make it retain its size, and add scroll buttons or something else instead. In addition to that, I cannot force the icon size to something specific. Sometimes stalonetray shows X-Chat’s icon in 48x48 pixels, sometimes in 24x24, and sometimes it first grows the window for 48x48-pixel icon, and then resize the icon to 24x24 – without shrinking the window back to its original size. Also, stalonetray does not shrink when icons are removed.

I have somewhat mixed emotions about stalonetray. The idea is great – effectively Gnome and KDE system tray for Gnome/KDE-independent environments with minimal dependencies. It works, but there’s lots of room for improvement. I keep starting stalonetray outside FvwmButtons from .xsession for now, but I have the feeling I will soon get rid of it. At least until the next time.