[kde-linux] Lost KMail, NUT-montior and QJackctl Icons from System Tray

[Duncan]

David Baron posted on Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:27:41 +0200 as excerpted:

> After a failed attempt to change over my system to 64 bit and restoring,
> I have problems getting plasma to reshow after rebooting the restored
> system. My login was the only one exercised on the errant system. Going
> to another login which worked fine, then going to mine got the desktop
> back. I had to replace some of the icons, applets, the panel, etc., but
> it is fine.
> 
> However, certain icons that were shown on the system tray no longer
> show. Kmail and qjackctl are indeed running but the icons are not there.
> The little NUT monitor is a x-windows (GTK?) object that also went to
> the tray and the app's window could be toggled from there.
> 
> How to get them back?

FWIW, it's generally useful to give what kde version you're talking 
about, since plasma among other things is still under intense development 
and there's often not so small changes between 4.x versions, and not so 
small bug appearances and fixes in 4.x.y versions altho it's only the 4.x 
versions that are supposed to have major feature changes.

Meanwhile, I'm running 4.7.90 here.  That's 4.8-beta2.  But the tray 
behavior is I think unchanged from 4.7, and IIRC 4.6 was similar, but I 
think there were some changes between 4.5. and 4.6, or it might have been 
between 4.6 and 4.7...

Anyway, the below describes the UI as I have it here on 4.7.90 and I'm 
guessing the following is what you're after.

1) Context-click (normally right-click) on the tray -- careful to avoid 
clicking an icon -- and select system tray settings.

2) In the setting dialog, click the Entries icon, and you should see a 
list of all the detected apps that have a tray icon, with a visibility 
selector beside each.

3) Ordinarily, the visibility selector is set to Auto, which I haven't 
quite figured out but the idea is that it hides icons that aren't 
active.  It sounds like you want to set some of them to Always Visible, 
instead.  (The third option is (always) hidden.)

4) Note that if you install a new tray app or activate the tray option on 
an app that you hadn't set before, it'll again default to auto.  If you 
ever don't see tray icons you expect, check here again, to see that they 
aren't set to auto (or hidden).

FWIW, I prefer to see all my tray icons, so I have all of them set to 
always visible, but obviously enough people prefer not to see them all 
that...  Well, I've always said I've never seen a desktop configured the 
way I want it out of the box, and I don't expect I ever will. <shrug> At 
least kde, unlike some other desktops, seems to recognize that users are 
different and that no one solution's going to work for everyone, and 
encourages exposing customization options to the user. =:^)

Of course, apps only appear there if plasma has seen them try to register 
a tray icon.  If for some reason plasma isn't seeing the tray icon 
registrations, it won't list the apps for you to set to always visible. 
=:^(  I don't know what to tell you if that's the case, except that if 
it's not listed there, something's broken deeper in the innards and 
plasma isn't seeing it register the tray icon in the first place.

Oh, and for the apps where it's an option (as it is for kmail I think, no 
clue about the others you mentioned), be sure they're set to have a tray 
icon. =:^/

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman