mate-notification-daemon fails to start on fedora f28 if multiple Desktops (mate, kde,gnome)

[stevef9432203]

Expected behaviour

Expect mate-notification daemon to start allowing notify-send to function

Actual behavior

Mate-notification daemon never starts

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

Installed F27 upgrade to F28 then sudo dnf groupinstalll "Mate Desktop"

MATE general version

v 1.20

Package version

mate-notification-daemon.x86_64 1.20.0-1.fc28 @fedora

Linux Distribution

Link to downstream report of your Distribution

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[lukefromdc]

Works fine on my machine using Debian Unstable. I think the daemon is only supposed to start when a notification is actually sent. See if it is actually functional on your machine: open to mate-control-center, open "popuip notifications: and click the "preview" button. You should see a "Notification Test" popup on your screen at the position shown in the "position" button. You can select any of the four corners of the screen, and one of four themes. If you get NO popup notification on "preview" than the daemon is not starting when a notification is sent to it either.

I saw on another issue report that dbus is used to activate this as needed, and it exits when the notification is done, rather than running as a fulltime daemon.

[raveit65]

Did you file out a redhat bugzilla report? Do you have kde installed?

[raveit65]

Using notify-send from command line forks here out of box in f28. Eg.

[rave@mother ~]$ notify-send Hello

[hkoba]

Hi! I'm using MATE desktop since 2013 and I love it! Thank you, teams!

This issue is one of the most annoying problems in MATE. I also suffered from this problem since F28. And the problem persists still on F32 too.

Fortunately, the following workaround I found today worked for me:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/dbus-1/services/

ln -vnsfr $(rpm -ql mate-notification-daemon|grep Notifications.service)  ~/.local/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service

Hope this helps.

[MASHtm]

I think this is a kind of race condition. On one of my three Fedora Desktops (since at least F28) I need to remove /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.plasma.Notifications.service installed from plasma-workspace-5.19.5-3.fc33.x86_64.rpm to keep mate-notification-daemon working. Don't know if this happens on other distributions as well if several service files provide Name=org.freedesktop.Notifications

I think the work around from the previous comment defines a higher priority definition for all services found in /usr/share

And just for clarification ... mate-notification-daemon does not stay in background nor needs to be started on session startup. It exists after some seconds anyway and gets started again by dbus if a message arrives.

[lukefromdc]

Note that I do NOT have kde installed, so might have avoided the race condition, assuming some difference in Debian would not prevent it anyway

[raveit65]

Will be fixed with https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-notification-daemon/pull/214