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Problem

I recently upgraded from 13.04 to 13.10, and suddenly notification bubbles don't appear themed as usual in the upper right corner, but they appear as white text on blue background in the upper-left corner. It looks like this:

Badly themed notification in the top-left corner.

Unsuccesful attempts to fix it

  • I tried reinstalling unity, notify-osd, ubuntu-desktop removed notification-daemon which was installed, none of that fixes it.

  • In fact running ps aux | grep notify-osd shows that notify-osd isn't even running. But when I try to start it manually by running /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/notify-osd I get:

    ** (notify-osd:4618): WARNING **: Another instance has already registered org.freedesktop.Notifications

** (notify-osd:4618): WARNING **: Could not register instance

  • If I understand well, the instance is registered by the /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service file, which right now contains:

    [D-BUS Service]
Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications
Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/notify-osd

    Renaming or deleting that file (and rebooting) has no effect whatsoever (and it is not recreated automatically).

  • This is not a duplicate of No notifications from notify-osd on 13.10 (and by the way I purged gnome-flashback-session along with notification-daemon)

Question(s)

How can I debug this? How can I get notifications to come back to normal?

If additional debug information is needed, I'll be happy to add it (just that I can't find any more).

David Foerster
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Wehlutyk
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  • Have you tried turning it off and on again (rebooting)? Do you have `xfce-notifyd` installed or any notification daemon other than `notify-osd`? What does `ps aux | grep osd` and/or `ps aux | grep noti` show? – dobey Nov 04 '13 at 16:12
  • Rebooting changes nothing. `xfce-notifyd` isn't installed (I don't of any other daemon); `ps aux | grep osd` gives nothing, and `ps aux | grep noti` shows `[fsnotify_mark]`, `update-notifier` and `/usr/lib/cups/notifier/dbus`. – Wehlutyk Nov 04 '13 at 16:38
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    In addition to what dobey said, have you installed any other desktop environments? Have you updated recently? Try running `apt-get autoremove`. What does it want to remove? – Seth Nov 04 '13 at 16:39
  • I have `i3wm` installed (should I try purging+autoremoving that?). `apt-get autoremove` removed no packages. And the problem appeared right after upgrading from 13.04 to 13.10. Edit: sorry, misunderstood the "update" question. (Am updating+rebooting) – Wehlutyk Nov 04 '13 at 16:43
  • @Wehlutyk Hmm. i3wm might or might not be the problem. When debugging it's always best to remove any possibilities though, so I would remove it. Uninstall it and then run `autoremove` again and reboot. See if the problem still exists. By update I meant updating the system, not upgrading from release to release. – Seth Nov 04 '13 at 16:49
  • I purged `i3wm`, autoremoved and rebooted (also checked for updates and everything is up to date) nothing changed. – Wehlutyk Nov 04 '13 at 16:59
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    The problem is that `notify-osd` nor `notification-daemon` draw notifications in that manner, under any condition, afaik. I'd suggest filing a proper bug on Launchpad about it, as Ask Ubuntu is not the place for bug reports, or debugging them. – dobey Nov 04 '13 at 17:39
  • Right you are. I'll post the link here once done. – Wehlutyk Nov 04 '13 at 17:45
  • Have you seen [this](http://askubuntu.com/questions/16173/notify-osd-stops-working-after-totem-has-been-running-for-a-while) question? Could it be related? – Seth Nov 04 '13 at 17:53

3 Answers3

51

i3 is using "dunst" notification daemon, so you have to remove it in order to re-enable ubuntu notify-osd.

Execute following from terminal:

sudo apt-get purge dunst
killall dunst
notify-send "Hello"
Seth
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Guest
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3

I had the same problem because of i3. Purging all packages that were installed with i3 helped me:

sudo apt-get purge i3 i3-wm i3lock suckless-tools i3status dunst

I think (but I'm not sure) that the problem was with dunst package - according to it's description it is notification daemon too.

ivalkeen
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0

This question is a bit old, but I believe I can add to it. The problem is not with i3, nor with dunst, but with D-Bus actually. Apparently it's bad at handling multiple notification providers. See the note here. I ran into the same issue with the XFCE notification daemon while running Arch.

Brent McKain
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