nm-applet is wrongly started with Gnome Shell

[Dylan McCall]

When I log in to Gnome Shell, nm-applet is wrongly autostarted as if I am running a session with Unity or gnome-panel. The application conflicts with Gnome Shell's own network notifications, resulting in a very broken experience.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that's an nm-applet autostart issue, it should start only in unity, what Ubuntu version do you use?

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

I'm seeing this issue in Oneiric. Thanks for pointing it in the right
direction :)

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Please make sure you have the latest version of Gnome Shell.

I can't reproduce this yet, and unbreaking this would need changes that would break other session types.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

It took me a bit to figure out what you meant since I didn't see nm-applet but you're right: notifications do appear twice and the second time is in an uglier style. I'm going to add gnome-shell to this bug report also.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

It's probably really an issue with nm-applet, but to find out:

If you're seeing these notifications, are they both showing the exact same text? If so, it should be possible to track down what sends the notification that looks "wrong" with dbus-monitor --monitor .

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

Yes, I have confirmed that the unwanted notifications come from nm-applet. Removing nm-applet from startup applications works around the problem, but it is not a good workaround because Unity and Gnome Classic's panel don't start nm-applet on their own; they're stuck with whatever is set in gnome-session-properties, because everyone uses the same gnome-session. (It's also problematic because gnome-session-properties has been tweaked so removing a startup application specified by the system is difficult).

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

So, I was reminded that gnome-session supports a really excellent AutostartCondition key now. All we need to do is use that with nm-applet's .desktop file. I'm submitting a patch that does just that. It should work for our purposes for this release :)

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Yes, the autostart line appears to do the right thing here: nm-applet runs in Unity or GNOME Fallback but not in GNOME Shell and it looks like GNOME Shell networking works fine without nm-applet running. Thank you!

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

I approved the changes, everything looks good; I'll merge this in shortly.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package network-manager-applet - 0.9.1.90-0ubuntu1

---------------
network-manager-applet (0.9.1.90-0ubuntu1) oneiric; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Split wireless/mobile dialogs into a new libnm-gtk library.

  [ Dylan McCall ]
  * debian/patches/04-autostart.patch:
    - disable autostart when using gnome-shell (LP: #852961)

  [ Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre ]
  * debian/control: add libnm-gtk0 and libnm-gtk-dev binary packages.
  * debian/control: bump network-manager-dev, libnm-*-dev Build-Depends
    to (>= 0.9.1).
  * debian/control: add iso-codes to Build-Depends.
  * debian/network-manager-gnome.install,
    debian/libnm-gtk0.install,
    debian/libnm-gtk-dev.install: install files to the right packages now that
    we have multiple binary packages.
  * debian/patches/nm-applet-use-indicator.patch: refresh.
  * debian/control, debian/rules: add network-manager-gnome-dbg. (LP: #415394)
  * debian/patches/vpn-import-export-dir.patch: fix default path for importing
    or exporting VPN connections. (LP: #634913)
  * debian/patches/mobile-wizard.patch: clear up the mobile wizard intro page
    buttons and titles. (LP: #856785)
 -- Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <email address hidden> Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:25:35 -0400

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

I don’t think this fix is correct. Without nm-applet running, gnome-shell is incapable of connecting to a VPN on its own. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658484 .

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Anders, yes, bug 863120 is the Ubuntu bug to undo this.