Menubar icons don't show in 11.04 Alpha 1 / systray not anymore supported

[James Gifford]

On 10.10 Netbook (Unity) the menubar icons for applications such as Dropbox, TweetDeck and Shutter (Those are the ones I've tried) would show up. Now, on 11.04A1, those icons don't show up. Tomboy notes does though, so I'm wondering: Do you have to write the program in a special way to have the icons show up in the new Unity?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Yes, you need to migrate to AppIndicators. We've dropped systray from
11.04, as announced in May.

Mark

[James Gifford (jamesgifford)]

Question for you Mark:
What was the reasoning behind the change? Why move from sytray and force (Yes, force) all the existing Ubuntu developers to change their perfectly fine, wonderful programs to use something different? If you want to make Ubuntu succeed as a Desktop OS, then you need to let the developers add new features instead of making it compatible with something that's new and frankly, isn't as flexible as it could (or for that matter, should) be.

James

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Hello Jrgifford, there are some fairly detailed answers on:

  Ubuntu’s Indicator Menus – Ayatana bearing fruit
  http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/347

It may also be worth checking on a couple of posts aboutthe related parts of the stack (a lot of it is about achieving predictable, uniform consistency to the user):

  A global menu for Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition
  http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359

and:

  Window indicators
  http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333

[mlaverdiere (mlaverdiere)]

For the records, here's 2 relevant comments/info in the #733312 #704833 reports, similar and/or marked as duplicated:

1. Temporary solution, i.e. whitelist all application to use the "old" notification area:: Those who want to achieve this just have to issue this command in a terminal:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "[ 'all' ]"

2. Permanent solution, i.e. a compability indicator would make a whitelist obsolete (See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-application/+bug/704833/comments/9 & following messages)

[rvaliant (rvaliant)]

I "whitelisted" all applications and now can longer access network, bluetooth, sound, and mail from the AppIndicators area. Wish I hadn't. ;)

[iMac (imac-netstatz)]

I think this might just be how you added "all" .. from a previous duplicate
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/733312/comments/2