[SOLVED] Gnome-shell message tray in top panel?

[viking777]

Has anybody found a way to move the gnome-shell message tray to the top panel?

I love gnome-shell, but I don't like having two panels, even when one is auto-hidden (the auto hiding just means you miss things that you should be seeing).

I don't care if the panel is at the top or the bottom but I don't want a dock of any sort either. As the title suggests I just want the message tray in the top panel so I can remove the bottom bar altogether.

The only solution I can find is this:

http://mybookmarks.ro/desktop-ubuntu...ger-extension/

And it just doesn't work. No problem with installing it, but the icons that I want to move stay exactly where they are - in the bottom panel.

So anyone got a solution?

Incidentally I only have two permanent icons in the bottom tray - Dropbox and checkgmail and intermittently the removable drive icon from a shell extension.

[viking777]

OK well it is pretty obvious that nobody knows the answer to the first post in this thread so I have another little 'teaser' for you.

Does anybody know the way to make the bottom panel permanently visible? ie. not auto hidden. This would do just as well as it is easy enough to hide the top panel.

The other day, due to a problem with another program, dropbox removed 2600 files from my computer without me knowing it. The reason I didn't know about it was because I couldn't see the icon because it was autohidden, and the first I knew about it was when the dbus message popped up AFTER the files had been deleted - insane design.

It is imho essential to either have the bottom panel permanently visible to prevent things like this from happening (or at least limit the damage by stopping them in a timely manner) or have icons that matter in the top panel where you can see what they are doing. As it is at the moment, everything in the top bar is of only passing interest to me and could easily be autohidden without ever causing damage or worry, not so the bottom panel.

[Gareth Jones]

Sorry, I don't know, but: I don't think having the message tray visible would have prevented this. It should un-hide as soon as a message arrives, so it sounds like DropBox sent the message after deleting the files. I agree that this is pretty appalling design, but rather the bad design is in DropBox for automatically deleting files without first asking permission.

Gareth

[viking777]

Originally Posted by Gareth Jones

Sorry, I don't know, but: I don't think having the message tray visible would have prevented this. It should un-hide as soon as a message arrives, so it sounds like DropBox sent the message after deleting the files. I agree that this is pretty appalling design, but rather the bad design is in DropBox for automatically deleting files without first asking permission.

Gareth

Thanks for the reply Gareth, although I don't really agree with you here. Dropbox has done nothing wrong. It does warn you of updates by animating the tray icon, and indeed gives you the ability to instantly make it stop what it is doing if you don't like it, that is fine with me, exactly the way I want it. Unfortunately those nice people at gnome come along and hide the ruddy icon from you so you can't see it. The fault is 100% with them not Dropbox.

Don't get me wrong here, I am not a gnome-shell 'basher' , I like gnome-shell and I think it is the best thing that has happened in Gnome for a very long time, but it drives me nuts to think that I have a specially coded and permanently displayed 'Status Menu' so I can see the latest 'tweet' from Angelina Joly instantly (at least I assume that is what the 'status menu' is for, I don't have a twitter account so I don't know for sure) but I can't see the latest backup from dropbox without unhiding the panel that the icon lives on .

If there were a Nobel prize for misplaced priorities then surely that would be a contender?

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by viking777

It does warn you of updates by animating the tray icon, and indeed gives you the ability to instantly make it stop what it is doing if you don't like it, that is fine with me, exactly the way I want it.

Fair enough. Personally I'd want a bit more than a change of status icon animation to warn me that my files were about to be deleted. What if I wasn't at the computer at the time?

But yeah, I don't know how to make it always visible I'm afraid.

Gareth

[viking777]

I am so close to solving this problem to my satisfaction now, but in order to 'close it out' I need some input from people that know something about the way to manage service startups on F16 .

I have discovered the following. If you autohide the gnome-shell top panel and then replace the bottom panel with tint2 you get pretty close to, what is for me, a highly usable gnome3 system. There is one problem and that is the gnome-shell systray.

Tint2 cannot run a systray if another one is already running, and the gnome-shell systray is a process that runs on startup and completely baulks tint2. I know this because if you can find the gnome-shell systray pid and kill it then tint2 works perfectly and gives me exactly what I am looking for. At the moment though the only way I know to get this pid is to run tint2 from the cli at which point it will tell you the pid that is stopping it from working.

My problem is that I don't have a clue about service management on Fedora. I believe it has something to do with systemd, but I don't even know that for sure. I am used to looking in /etc/init.d but there is nothing in there, I ran chkconfig --list, but there are so few services in there that that can't be how it is launched, so how can I first find and then PERMANENTLY kill the gnome-shell systray service when I don't even know what it is called?

Edit. Actually, forget it. The pid that I was killing was not the pid of the systray it was the pid of gnome-shell itself, so I can actually achieve the same thing by just waiting for everything to start up and then doing Alt/F2 r. Whilst gnome-shell is restarting the icons transfer to tint2 and stay there. Maybe I have to do this manually every time or I have to impose a start up delay on gnome-shell Neither of them seem that good an idea.

[Gareth Jones]

My guess would be that it's a thread of gnome-shell rather than a discrete process in its own right, in which case session management is unlikely to be directly involved. Run "gnome-session-properties" to see start-up applications, but I checked here and I can't see a likely program.

You might end up having to dig around in gnome-shell JavaScript I fear.

Gareth

[viking777]

Originally Posted by Gareth Jones

My guess would be that it's a thread of gnome-shell rather than a discrete process in its own right, in which case session management is unlikely to be directly involved. Run "gnome-session-properties" to see start-up applications, but I checked here and I can't see a likely program.

You might end up having to dig around in gnome-shell JavaScript I fear.

Gareth

My edit crossed with your post and you were exactly right it was not a discrete process it was gnome-shell

[viking777]

This is now solved. I went to https://extensions.gnome.org/ and installed the excellent "Evil Status Icon Forever" extension.

Even as I write this I think I may have got more response if I had used the correct terminology in the title. It is not the message tray I wanted in the top panel but the systray

Anyway it is fixed now and if anybody else want the same thing then the answer is on the page above.

[Rick Richardson]

Evil Status Icon Forever works for checkgmail!!!

$ pwd
/home/rick/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/EvilStatusIconForever@bone.twbbs.org.tw

$ diff -u extension.js.org extension.js
--- extension.js.org 2012-05-11 20:23:35.617601958 -0500
+++ extension.js 2012-05-11 20:21:33.159685194 -0500
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@
//

var notification = [
+ 'checkgmail', // checkgmail
'deadbeef', // Deadbeef Music Player
'pidgin', // Pidgin IM Client
'gcin', // GCIN Chinese Input Method