notification-daemon conflicts with notify-osd when running GNOME Flashback

[dhenry]

In Ubuntu 13.10, there is a conflict between notification-daemon and notify-osd when running a GNOME Flashback session.

The following two issues are correlated:

1) When a notification arise, there is a mix of GNOME 3-like and Ubuntu notification styles (graphically). It can be easily reproduced with the notify-send command.

2) The events like volume up/down/mute no longer shows a notification. To reproduce, just use the keyboard's volume buttons, or scroll on the sound indicator in the gnome panel.

After some investigation, I found that killing the process /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon fixes the problem. After that, the notifications uses only the Ubuntu's style and the volume up/down/mute notifications appears again.

The gnome-session-flashback 3.6.2 package depends on the notification-daemon 0.7.6 package, which autostarts the notification-daemon process when running a GNOME Flashback session. I could manage to disable it by editing the file /etc/xdg/autostart/notification-daemon.desktop. As a workaround, I changed the line:

    AutostartCondition=GNOME3 unless-session gnome

To:

    AutostartCondition=false

Something should be done so that GNOME Flashback uses only one notification system, either Ubuntu one or notification-daemon, but not both at the same time. Moreover, if it is decided to use notification-daemon, the missing notifications mentioned above (volume...) should be fixed.

[dhenry (tfc-duke)]

Initial discussion on Ask Ubuntu: http://askubuntu.com/questions/367961/no-notifications-from-notify-osd-on-13-10

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Rob Quill (rob-quill)]

Personally I prefer the non notification-daemon notifications. With NotifyOSD Configuration it is possible to change the style (especially text size, which seems to be much larger in the notification-daemon notifications) and I can choose where the notifications appear using "gsettings set com.canonical.notify-osd gravity" which doesn't seem to be possible with the notification-daemon notifications.