Today panel has started playing up. First the notification area (the one that shows open windows) disappeared. I have rebooted and attempted to reinsert the notification area but nothing happens. Other applets can be inserted.
After reviewing other applets I noticed the dropbox icon has disappeared. Dropbox is opened in a startup script using “dbus-launch dropbox start”. This is/was done to get the icon to appear in the indicator applet with the associated context menu. I have stopped dropbox and tried reinserting the notification area but to no avail. If I start dropbox without using dbus an icon appears on screen but I am unable to access the right-click context menu.
Anyone have any ideas…
My system is Ubuntu 14.04 with Mate Desktop Environmenrt 1.8.2. Mate Panel is 1.8.1.
One work around I’ve found is to put it manually in the Startup Application
System > Preferences > Personal > Startup Applications
Add in an entry for Dropbox and use dropbox stop && dbus-launch dropbox start for the command line.
This works for Xubuntu as well
As explained in the OP this is what I was doing; running dropbox manually from a startup script. This no longer works in Mate Panel.
Did you disable dropbox’s own startup script? (dropbox autostart n) and have you tried calling dropbox like this: DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="" dropbox start?
No that did not work.
It is worth noting that the notification Area Applet and Dropbox icon from the Indicator Applet at the same time. The reason why dropbox worked with the dbus-launch command previously was because it avoided problems with the Notification Area Applet (no idea how or why, but this was mentioned in a number of posts).
A common problem I experience is the loading of applets in my notification area at bootup/login. I think it is known as a “race condition”. Put simply, lots of things trying to load at the same time at login can cause some of them to get missed.
The way I have fixed it is by unchecking any of the startups for the offending apps in the startup applications list. Then knocking up simple bash scripts for each of the apps with sleep command prefixes in the scripts. I vary the duration of the sleep command across the different scripts. That way they all load at login. But over a period of, say, 30 seconds. Thus, they don’t get stuck in the queue and get missed
I have found the above method fixes most of the problems relating to stuff not getting loaded at login,
An example of the above might be:
sleep 10
skype
I would save this as “skype.sh” in my home folder. I would then go into a terminal in my home folder and type:
sudo chmod +x skype.sh
This command makes the bash script executable which it needs to be to be used as a bash script.
Then go to preferences/startup application and add a new entry. In the command field, navigate to your bash script. In the name field, give it any name you want. Save and close. The next time you log in, your app should load in the notifications area properly
As an addendum, I noticed that the Dropbox icon in mate-panel has been acting up recently. Sometimes, when it loads, it loads with a broken icon. If I click on the icon it has no sub menu. However, if I manually open my Dropbox folder and add a file, and then log into my Dropbox account on the internet, I can see that it is actually working and the file has synced to the Dropbox cloud storage. Thus, Dropbox does still appear to be working despite the broken link in the notifications area. This problem with the broken Dropbox notifications icon seems to have cleared up with my 16.04 installation, though And, in any event, it is a slightly separate issue from it not loading at all
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One thing I’m curious about, are you using the caja-dropbox or regular dropbox?
Also, you could just put them in a master startup script that might read something like
sleep 10
skype
sleep 10
caja-dropbox
...
that would slow your digital log jam and keep everything in one place. Are you by chance running this on a single core or older machine with minimal memory?
I am using caja dropbox.
As for putting them in one script, one would have thought there would be no problem with that. However, through trial and experience and for reasons that are utterly inexplicable to me I have found that putting them all on the same script can very occasionally lead to none of them loading. So, I always do them as separate scripts. But, just vary the sleep duration so that they are all more or less guaranteed to not bump into each other at login. There doesn’t need to be more than a second or two from one to the next for this to be the case. So, over the course of about 15 seconds following login, they are all loaded. What you can also do, following getting them all to load, is to tweak around with lowering the sleep commands sufficient to keep them all loading properly until you reach a point where one or more of them begin to fail to load again. At which point, tweak the sleep command back up slightly.
As for the age and performance of my machine; I initially did the above trick on a very old single core Dell I owned and so, naturally, I thought that the problem was related to its age. However, I since bought a brand new powerful machine several months back and found the problem persisted. I fixed it the same way. So, it doesn’t seem to be related to machine performance, though I should think that doesn’t help.
Wow, you got me what’s going on, I have 6 machines running 16.04, 4 real, 2 virtual and have been unable to replicate what your experiencing. The closest I’ve come in on an old Acer Netbook with a single core Celeron. The system will sometimes kill applications when it runs low on memory (I’m forcing it to work without a swap partition) but even that is rare.
I guess it may be the particular combination of programs I am loading?
btsync
dropbox
qbittorrent
guake
skype
thunderbird
(one or two others that I occasionally use)
I should say, I am not bothered by this issue in the slightest since I have a fix that works every time
Since your using Guake, have you disabled Tilda from starting? That might improve things a tiny bit. I can see why there is some conflict going on. You have 5 applications all demanding a port to be opened right now. I’m glad to see that a staggered startup is working.
Yeah I disabled Tilda. Nothing significantly wrong with it and it certainly runs light. I just prefer Guake.
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Steve,
As explained in the original post I also had my dropbox command in a startup script. My problems were encountered despite having these measures in place.
That said, as randomly as the problem appeared the problem has disappeared. Dropbox and the Notification Area Applet have started working again. Apart from trying various combos to see if I could get dropbox to operate I have done nothing. Certainly nothing to change the Notification Area Applet.
I am using dropbox. caja-dropbox is a program that integrates dropbox with caja. My system appears to be using nautilus. Probably since I loaded mate-desktop over Ubuntu 14.04.