Xfce Forum

jakfish

Member

Registered: 2019-12-23

Posts: 85

Odd Failure of Panel Notifications

Seemingly out of the blue--as in no new program install, etc--panel ver. 4.21.1 on 32-bit Mageia on Sony Vaio VGN-P588E stopped sending notifications.

I eventually tracked down a solution: run

/usr/lib/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd

in terminal or session autostart to restore notifications.

Is this a hardware issue, software issue? I had never encountered it before.

More Follow-up: notifications stopped and the above-listed command now produces this error in terminal

Segmentation fault (core dumped) /usr/lib/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd

I deleted

~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-notifyd.xml

and logged out and back and still no panel notifications.

notify-send "Test" "Test"

did send a notification before but now

Failed to show notification: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Notifications was not provided by any .service files

Last edited by jakfish (2026-07-08 17:00:23)

brianallen

Member

Registered: 2026-07-08

Posts: 1

Re: Odd Failure of Panel Notifications

The `ServiceUnknown` error makes it look more like `xfce4-notifyd` isn't starting properly rather than a panel issue. Since it's now crashing with a segmentation fault, I'd check whether a recent package update introduced the problem.

You could also try running `xfce4-notifyd --replace` from a terminal and check `journalctl` or `dmesg` for any crash details. If it still segfaults with a fresh config, it may be worth reinstalling the `xfce4-notifyd` package or reporting it as a bug.

jakfish

Member

Registered: 2019-12-23

Posts: 85

Re: Odd Failure of Panel Notifications

Thanks, @brianallen. I did reinstall xfce4-notifyd and the problem did not remain persistent (xfce4-notifyd sometimes started). I ended up disabling anything xfce4-notifyd in boot/autostart, and installed and used dunst instead.

Notifications are back, and this seems to be the workaround so far.