Xfce Forum

cyberplunk

Member

Registered: 2023-01-13

Posts: 11

[SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

For some unknown reason, every time I log in, half the icons in my system tray are missing. I have to open up a terminal and hit

xfce4-panel -r

for them to appear.

Before Refresh:

After Refresh:

In addition, if I open an application that's supposed to have a system tray icon, I have to refresh the panel to see the icon.

This sounds similar to this issue that was posted just yesterday: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16431. The advice there was to upgrade to 4.16.5. In fact, I just upgraded to 4.18 from 4.16.3, and the problem remains.

I welcome any insight the community can provide. Thanks!

Last edited by cyberplunk (2023-01-14 18:00:46)

Tamaranch

Member

Registered: 2020-12-31

Posts: 321

Re: [SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

Do you have ayatana-indicator-application installed, or similar package depending on your distribution?

cyberplunk

Member

Registered: 2023-01-13

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

Hey, thanks for the prompt reply!

I've never heard about ayatana-indicator-application before, and I don't have it installed to the best of my knowledge. I'm also not clear on what you mean by "similar package". Which packages should I look for?

Tamaranch

Member

Registered: 2020-12-31

Posts: 321

Re: [SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

This package, but it might have a slightly different name on your system. As I said in https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=70522#p70522 you can restart only the plugin instead of the whole panel, it's more "transparent" if you automate it.

Other than that I don't know what else to say, because I can't reproduce this problem.

cyberplunk

Member

Registered: 2023-01-13

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

I tried

pkill -HUP -f libsystray

It refreshes the system tray as well, but there's still the problem of new applications not appearing there when opened, so functionally, there's no change. Interestingly, the icons DO disappear when the application is closed. How would I check to see if ayatana-indicator-application (or a similarly-named application) is installed on my system?

In addition, I maintain a clean copy of Xubuntu (22.04 with XFCE 4.16.3) in a VM, so I fired that up and installed Zoom to see what would happen in the system tray. Here, the icon appeared twice:

Right clicking on the right-most Zoom icon shows this:

Left-clicking on that same icon shows this:

Right-clicking on the left icon shows this:

Left-clicking on the left icon does nothing.

I've seen this happen with other applications in the system tray before. Could this issue be related to the one I'm experiencing?

Last edited by cyberplunk (2023-01-14 03:32:03)

k3dAR

Member

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2022-07-27

Posts: 16

Re: [SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

"pkill -HUP -f libsystray" is not sollution... only refresh systray applet on panel with current running tray icons

to be sure you not have running ayatana-indicator-application, can you confirm by check running process:

ps aux | grep ayatana

cyberplunk

Member

Registered: 2023-01-13

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

Well, how about that? It turns out I DID have ayatana-indicator-plugin installed and running. It must be something that comes bundled with Xubuntu. It was in sleeping status, but once I killed it and refreshed the system tray, everything started working normally again!

I went back to my clean install of Xubuntu and found ayatana running there as well. When I killed that process and refreshed the panel, the problem of duplicate icons described above persisted. (By the way, it turns out that when I left-click on the left Zoom icon, it opens up the Zoom window.)

I'd say it was a Zoom problem, but when I first killed ayatana on my main machine, I found some of the icons were duplicated there, too, although those disappeared when I refreshed the panel, and they haven't come back since.

I'll go ahead and mark this thread as solved because the problem cited in my original post has been fixed. However, I am left with a couple of questions:

- What's causing the duplicate systray icons on my VM image?
- I noticed that ayatana started up again after rebooting my machine. This doesn't surprise me, and the system tray is still behaving normally. However, to prevent this problem from reoccurring, should I permanently disable the ayatana process? If so, how should I do that?

Thanks again to the community for all of their help!

Tamaranch

Member

Registered: 2020-12-31

Posts: 321

Re: [SOLVED] xfce4-panel Requires Refresh for All Icons to Appear

Glad to hear it was because of ayatana-indicator-*, it definitely confirms the conclusion of https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/-/issues/599
About duplicate icons it's "normal": there are two plugins in one in the systray, and they can sometimes be duplicate. You have to hide the duplicate icons in the prefs dialog. See e.g. https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=66968#p66968