Xfce Forum

morciej

Member

Registered: 2022-05-05

Posts: 6

Trouble with xfce-timer-plugin recurring alarm

I am using Linux Mint Una. I have xfce4-timer-plugin set up. I only have one alarm, at 23:50 hrs. It's my "go to bed already" alarm :-). I have to click it to enable, every single time I start the computer. If I forget, I miss my bedtime. :-(

I know that I could use a desktop robot app to activate it, but then I have to run that with a startup delay. Why bother? Just run a cron job to play a sound file, and delete the plugin. I am looking for a less kludge-y way to activate it.

Frankly, the very existence of this bug surprises me. If the plugin is to be useful at all as a daily recurring alarm, it must be activated without any user intervention. A one-time alarm, of course, has to be activated manually, but there are these two scenarios, so we need another button in the setup window to distinguish them.

BTW, I tried a Gnome alarm-clock-applet. It self-starts, but its problem is that it rings immediately upon startup, because it believes time for activation has already passed. It did, the previous night. So I HOPE that when this bug gets fixed, it will not result in spurious alarms being activated at the next computer startup time. Besides, alarm-clock-applet has no maintainer, so chances it will be fixed are slim to none.

Question: Where do I need to look to locate the piece of code that initializes the condition of the alarm to "not running"? I am not familiar with structure of the xfce plugins. It seems to be using some timer library that is not part of the project... I am just not sure where to begin hacking.

I have put in an issue with xfce gitlab.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Trouble with xfce-timer-plugin recurring alarm

Hello and welcome.

What version of the timer plugin are you running? In 1.7.1, there is an option to "Autostart" the plugin - which seems to work. However, autostart only seems to autostart the first timer entry in a list of restartable timers.

The timer plugin is very simple - there is only one .c file located here. All the code will be found in that file. The code snippet to autostart the timer is at line 1782.

There appears to be a few bugs in this code - for example, setting an alarm to autostart at time of creation doesn't save the setting. You need to go back in and edit it and set it to autostart.

Last edited by ToZ (2022-05-06 01:51:42)

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morciej

Member

Registered: 2022-05-05

Posts: 6

Re: Trouble with xfce-timer-plugin recurring alarm

Oh lovely! Sigh... it's 1.7.0 in Linux Mint. Good this was fixed in the 1.7.1. Dependencies dependencies... I guess I'll have to wait until Mint version 21. They are working on that upgrade as we speak. Meanwhile, the simplest way seems to be to use xdotool after all.

Thanks a lot!

Last edited by morciej (2022-05-06 05:29:15)