# notify-send doesn't do anything since installing FreeBSD 9-stable



## y2s82 (Mar 8, 2012)

In past week, I've reinstalled the computer with FreeBSD 9 from source from scratch.  I've also rebuilt the port, too.  Ever since, notify-send stopped responding.

As far as I understand, as long as I have devel/libnotify and deskutils/notification-daemon it should work, shouldn't it?  I found no particular information on this in UPDATING file.  I've tried reinstalling them both several times but has yet to work.  Could this be a problem with clang or have I missed something?


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## y2s82 (Jun 23, 2012)

After searching around the web for a bit, I found some lead.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=638721

I assume, now, the trouble lies not with FreeBSD or clang but within the port itself. It seems the relevant service is no longer associated with DBUS.  After looking through the pkg-plist, I tracked down notification-daemon to /usr/local/libexec/notification-daemon.  After doing `/usr/local/libexec/notification-daemon`, everything works as it once did.  

I guess then the question is this: knowing this, what's the best way to proceed?  Should I simply have root cron execute the file on every boot? Is that supposed to work like that or would that cause some other hickups or other unexpected drain on the system resources?


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## tingo (Jun 23, 2012)

If the daemon is supposed to be started at boot, a script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d would be appropriate.
But, I'm not so sure that this daemon should be started in this way. Perhaps it should be started as a part of the Xorg / DE startup instead.


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## wblock@ (Jun 23, 2012)

y2s82 said:
			
		

> In past week, I've reinstalled the computer with FreeBSD 9 from source from scratch.  I've also rebuilt the port, too.  Ever since, notify-send stopped responding.



Rebuilt just that one port, or all of them?


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## y2s82 (Jun 23, 2012)

@tingo
Yeah, I wasn't sure on that note.  At least it doesn't seem to be the intended in the design to be ran at boot.

@wblock@

I rebuilt all of them back then.

Recently, with your assistance in fact, I reinstalled the system into a new disk and rebuilt all the ports.  The problem is still there.

I tried to circumvent the problem by creating /usr/local/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service with the following

```
[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
Exec=/usr/local/libexec/notification-daemon
```
which turned out to be a *mistake*; now, after running the daemon, sending notification would simply crash the daemon with the following error:

```
** (notification-daemon:4038): DEBUG: Adding id 1

Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_visual_get_red_pixel_details: assertion `GDK_IS_VISUAL (visual)' failed
aborting...
zsh: abort (core dumped)  /usr/local/libexec/notification-daemon
```
I erased the file I created to no avail.

I'm not sure what more I can do.  Any suggestions?


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## y2s82 (Jul 7, 2012)

Recently, for an unrelated matter, I installed x11-wm/spectrwm to give it a try.  I am back with openbox again, but something odd happened while trying out and going back and forth between the two window managers.  In the process of things, I suddenly started getting bunch of messages through the notification system from one of my programs.  I was not able to reproduce the condition which suddenly allowed the notification-daemon to work, but it made my go on a search again.  I found this, which suggests the culprit is in fact a bug in GTK+3.  The post concludes saying the bug as been fixed in the latest version in Debian, and their version number on the post seems to math that in our tree.  Am I wrong in this?  Or is our port x11-toolkits/gtk30 still the version with this bug?  If the bug is still there, what steps can I take the address this problem?


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