Hi,
I am having a little trouble getting notify-send to work the way I would like it to.
I am using ubuntu - karmic koala 2.6.31-19-generic #56-Ubuntu SMP
So here's the problem
run the following commands one after the other.
notify-send -i info -t 100000 -- "Hi" "world" &
notify-send -i info -t 100000 -- "Bye" "world"
See what happened?
The first message pops up. But the second one takes a whole 10 seconds before it shows up. This is because i set -t to 10 sec. What I would like in an ideal world to happen is I see two balloon pop ups. So the messages appear right when they should.
I recall this used to work in earlier versions on ubuntu, I guess that was using dbus, instead of notify-send.
I hope someone comes up with a solution to this real soon.
notify-send does not support the enqueue option, which is needed to tell dbus notification whether or not to enqueue the message or display it all at once. Also, the -t option in the commands you entered are for 100 seconds, as the -t is in milliseconds, but it doesn't matter anyway, as ubuntu has disabled the timeout option for its notification system. All of the messages sent from notify send get ~10 seconds.
Thanks for your reply, although it sounds like you re-iterated the existing problems. I am wondering if there is a solution/work around/alternatives to notify-send. Can I use some dbus utility that does similar stuff without those shortcomings/bugs in notify-send? I upgraded to lucid-lynx, which is still in development, hoping that somebody bumps up this issue such that it works when 10.4 is finally released.
Well, I don't know of any utility to do that, but it possible to access dbus directly, which is what the programmers generally do. I don't know how though, so I can't help there. Notify-send hasn't been updated in a while, but you can still try submitting feature requests to the ubuntu launchpad site in the hopes that they will patch it or directly to the authors site to try to get the enqueue option added.
As for the timeout not being supported in ubuntu, this is on purpose: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/\+source/notify-osd/\+bug/390508
Also, there is a patched notification system on that page, that can do timeouts, so you can at least use that to solve on problem.