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AllTray is an application which enables you to “dock” an application of your choosing into your system tray/notification area. However, it is a sensitive program and sometimes behaves strangely. If you need to file a bug on the AllTray package, providing additional information is always helpful.

AllTray is known to work (well) with Metacity, KWin, and the Compiz window managers. It may work with other window managers and desktop environments, as well. If you find a situation wherein AllTray does not properly work, you will need to file a bug in AllTray. First, you will need to collect information about your problem, to help those who will read your bug report.

The two “modes” of AllTray

AllTray is commonly used in two modes: “click mode”, and normal mode. Click mode is where you start your target application first, and then use AllTray to dock it to the System Tray/Notification Area later (after starting it in Applications→Accessories→AllTray). Normal mode is where you start (from a terminal or a desktop shortcut) an application that runs AllTray, which subsequently runs your target application. Here is an example of using AllTray in click mode:

• Start Thunderbird.

• Start AllTray, and click on the Thunderbird window.

Here is an example of using AllTray in normal mode:

• Create a launcher that runs "alltray thunderbird"
• Start Thunderbird using the newly-created launcher.

Basic Troubleshooting

You should be able to identify how you use AllTray, based on the section above. Now, you'll need to run AllTray in a terminal, to capture some debugging output that will be useful to include in your bug report. To do this, open a terminal such as GNOME Terminal (on GNOME), Konsole (on KDE), or XFCE’s terminal application, on XFCE. Then, within the terminal:

• If you are using click mode, type alltray -d > alltray_debug.log

• If you are using normal mode, type alltray -d YOUR_APPLICATION > alltray_debug.log

Of course, if you use any additional options (such as the -na option), add those to the AllTray command line as per normal. Then, use AllTray (and your application) for long enough to replicate the issue you were having with AllTray, and then kill AllTray by pressing Control+C in your terminal window that you started it all in.

Then, create (or modify) your bug report, attaching the alltray_debug.log file to the bug report.

Helping Out

I (MichaelTrausch) have the intention of trying to adopt the AllTray program (it is no longer maintained upstream) and performing some major refactoring and, in some cases, rewriting of the code to better handle various situations such as command-line parsing, management of window managers which require workarounds, and perhaps changing the program to do some things in a more standard way. However, if I am unable to maintain the project, I may have to fork it (and of course, I am trying to prevent this; I do not like forks any more than you probably do). Either way, once I know what is going on with the upstream source package, I am going to create a bzr repository and work on that to try to “clean up” the upstream AllTray. If you have any programming experience, and interest in helping out, please contact me (MichaelTrausch).

CategoryDebugging