Insync doesn't show on notification area after logging out from Xfce session and logging back in

When I log out from my current Xfce session and log back in, insync show a notification saying that it is already running so it will quit. I checked and there was indeed this process running:

./insync start

but no icon was shown on the notification area. I had to kill it and start insync again to get the icon to appear on the notification area.

I’m running insync 1.2.6.35101-trusty over Xubuntu 14.10.

@marcelpaulo See howto here. (LINUX) How to solve the issue "tray icon is not showing"

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks @roald for that howto, I missed it when I searched the forum, before posting. However, it addresses a different problem than mine. The insync icon is showing on the notification area, as you can see here:

However, if I log out from my current Xfce session, and log back in, insync stays running:

paulo@monk:~$ ps -ef | grep insync
paulo     8072     1  0 Abr07 ?        00:01:36 ./insync start
paulo     8493  8446  0 01:56 pts/1    00:00:00 grep insync

but the icon is not shown on the notification area:

I know that I can kill the currently running insync instance and start it back, that’s what I’ve been doing, but I hope you will agree that insync should be able to restore itself on the notification area on its own, without the need of manual intervention. To intervene manually is a workaround but not a solution: if insync can’t restore its original state (running AND showing its icon on the notification area) after a logout/login, it’s failing to perform a basic task in a desktop environment.

I consider this a bug which needs to be adressed.

Paulo

PS: sni-qt is installed:

paulo@monk:~$ apt-cache policy sni-qt
sni-qt:
  Installed: 0.2.6-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.2.6-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.2.6-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ utopic/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

EDIT: If package sni-qt is indeed necessary for insync, I’d suggest including it in the Depends section of the package, so that it’s always installed together with insync.

@marcelpaulo Do you have other Qt apps like Skype or DropBox (version 3 or higher) installed? Do they also have the same issue?

Hey, good idea !

  1. Started Skype:
  2. After resuming from suspend:

    Skype is gone:
paulo@monk:~$ ps -ef | grep -i skype
paulo    10751 10697  0 09:37 pts/0    00:00:00 grep -i skype

I don’t have Dropbox installed right now. But it does look like a QT problem. syncthing (the round blue icon) is GTK, and doesn’t have problems.

You will have noticed that the insync daemon is on the panel after resuming from suspend. It doesn’t, as I showed before, but I whipped a workaround: Xubuntu uses lightdm as display manager, so I installed a logout hook in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf:

session-cleanup-script=/home/paulo/bin/lightdm-cleanup

This script gets (from a config file) a list of processes to kill when a lightdm session finishes:

KILL='textaid-server insync megasync'

and kills them all:

for process in $KILL                                                                                                                                                                              
do                                                                                                                                                                                                
    pid=$(pgrep -f $process)                                                                                                                                                                      
    if [[ $pid ]]; then                                                                                                                                                                           
        kill $pid                                                                                                                                                                                 
        display killed $process pid $pid                                                                                                                                                          
    fi                                                                                                                                                                                            
done

PS: I don’t use megasync but my mother does, and I sync the script/config between our desktops. I’ll check whether it’s also QT, and report back. It behaves like insync on suspending: the process stays running, but the icon disappears from the notification area. Which reminds me: I’ll open a bug report with them, too.

Oh, wrong conclusions ! If Skype was gone after resuming from logout, it’s working as expected. Just to confirm:

  1. Started Skype:
  2. Configured Skype to start automatically at each new session:
  3. Logged out and back in:

    Skype was started back and its icon is on the notification area.

So, as Skype doesn’t exhibit the error, I suppose it’s not related to QT.

PS: As I said, the insync icon is showing because my script kills insync when the lightdm session ends

Thanks for testing. It seems like a general case of the Insync tray icon not showing at startup. It’s on our list of TODOs. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Perhaps, to be more precise, the core problem is: why insync doesn’t die on session logout? That’s what causes what I observed. I see now that I reported a symptom and not a root cause.

Well, the workaround is now documented here in case someone gets bitten by the same problem.

It was fun testing it!

That’s an avenue that we can investigate, thanks for the suggestion.