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I'm running Debian and logging in straight to Openbox.

I'm sure that I sometimes receive notifications, which I can actually theme and modify through Xfce's notification settings manager, but what is actually running in the background and displaying these notifications? Is it a part of Xfce?

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  • If you have Xfce installed and active, then what do you mean by "pure Openbox environment"? Xfce uses xfce4-notifyd-config for the notifications. But if one runs "pure" Openbox, I would not expect to see it. Commented Jul 8, 2013 at 2:56
  • I'm planning to install Debian without a desktop environment. However, I have this fear that there are dozens of utilities and daemons that I should be running, that will simply not exist in Openbox. I don't want to end up with a system that is crippled in the background, so I'd like to gather information on what kind of aforementioned daemons I should actually be running... Got any advice maybe? Commented Jul 8, 2013 at 12:09
  • Sorry, was year+ late :P, provided the hard info, hopefully it will help searchers. Commented Oct 18, 2015 at 1:22
  • @TechZilla That's how SO's supposed to work, gj :D Commented Oct 20, 2015 at 5:43

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The daemon in Xfce for displaying notifications is xfce4-notifyd in debian it is installed with the package of the same name.

The daemon can be started if for example notify-send "TEST" is run (notify-send comes with the libnotify-bin package).

But there could also be some other program making use of the notification-libraries libnotify4.

So to find out which programms can do this run

apt-cache rdepends libnotify4 --installed

This will give you all the packages that depend on libnotify4 and are installed.

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The popup notifications are indeed provided by the Desktop Environment, and are described in more detail, https://developer.gnome.org/notification-spec/. (org.freedesktop.Notifications.Notify)

When running a pure Openbox session, libnotify messages will go unheard. Once you install a notify daemon, you will be able to see the messages within your Openbox session.

Each of the DE's provide their own daemon, so pick whichever one you prefer. I personally prefer notify-osd, ...had the dependencies, as written using Clutter, looks modern.

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