How do I close passive popups?

72 views
Skip to first unread message

Patrick Schleizer

unread,
Jun 26, 2015, 8:09:49 PM6/26/15
to qubes-users
Hi,

how do I close passive popups? [1]

Apparently they have no close button, so one has to wait until those are
gone? Any other way?

Cheers,
Patrick

[1] kdialog --passivepopup text 60

Marek Marczykowski-Górecki

unread,
Jun 26, 2015, 8:18:41 PM6/26/15
to Patrick Schleizer, qubes-users
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 12:09:42AM +0000, Patrick Schleizer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> how do I close passive popups? [1]
>
> Apparently they have no close button, so one has to wait until those are
> gone? Any other way?

Just click on it :)

> Cheers,
> Patrick
>
> [1] kdialog --passivepopup text 60
>

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJVjevYAAoJENuP0xzK19csc+AIAJjUs8/iRrcSlULB+Xs90ubg
2P1qELuC6Q8/Cfzoog+tlUXVr0LYSUbmeBIPz/PzsOsPS6+1goB7k9kBuHDUiNeC
1EZk0hOM9pCWCPuvXWZnNwii5IsnUPLudC9d9Tr6ccfuntQhSRjJjBakh3RRDPsO
qlV0pVrFfV5VWjQSqJZxNfa0kRsvffQYkOM+Z60TLqZNhjIvVAemYvpttKBAnWFQ
/9dtKkfTHXDGtt6SZYLnq5L1bi7ijGAjhpfRf3ncTKsMTM1kIj+C8OUB49aYV7RH
boDRWMJ21Q7W8suxm++7PnK5bjQv69f0a5jsKDi4A7c2uplz34tEf6PoWpgaMqY=
=/nLJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Patrick Schleizer

unread,
Jun 26, 2015, 9:16:09 PM6/26/15
to qubes...@googlegroups.com
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki:
> On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 12:09:42AM +0000, Patrick Schleizer wrote:
>> Hi,
>
>> how do I close passive popups? [1]
>
>> Apparently they have no close button, so one has to wait until those are
>> gone? Any other way?
>
> Just click on it :)

Indeed.

Somehow that didn't work for me earlier.

Cheers,
Patrick

Patrick Schleizer

unread,
Jul 3, 2015, 7:04:50 PM7/3/15
to qubes...@googlegroups.com, nrgaway
I am sure now. There is an issue here. I am able to reproduce it.

Start a debian-8 based AppVM. Test command:

notify-send test

It won't go away by clicking it.

Fedora based AppVMs do not have this issue.

Cheers,
Patrick

Unman

unread,
Jul 3, 2015, 7:29:12 PM7/3/15
to Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com, nrgaway
Interesting, because the command does nothing for me. No pop up,
nothing. Are you using a vanilla deb-8 template?

Patrick Schleizer

unread,
Jul 3, 2015, 8:59:21 PM7/3/15
to qubes...@googlegroups.com, Unman, nrgaway
Unman:
Yes. (Qubes Q3 RC1)

Well, that's how one can use notify-send to create passive popups on
plain Debian.

If it does nothing for you, then that's another (related) bug.

Cheers,
Patrick

cprise

unread,
Jul 3, 2015, 9:16:29 PM7/3/15
to Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com, nrgaway
I noticed the same thing when switching from Fedora 20 to Debian 8 for
my VPN. The notify windows occassionally won't go away by themselves or
by clicking.

However, if I open a terminal window in that VM, the window will
disappear after a few seconds and the problem won't reoccur until the VM
is rebooted.

cprise

unread,
Jul 3, 2015, 9:25:49 PM7/3/15
to Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com, Unman, nrgaway
I think there may be differences in how the Debian 8 template handles
this depending on whether you installed a desktop environment (and which
one). Also, it depends on whether dconf service is running and your
shell/script has a 'DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS' environment variable set.
So a root-user process spawned from systemd will not have its
notify-send requests displayed by default, whereas a gnome-terminal on
the desktop with non-root user should be able to display with notify-send.

See my posted VPN 'up.sh' script for the method I use to set the
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS variable.

nrgaway

unread,
Jul 3, 2015, 9:55:42 PM7/3/15
to cprise, Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com, Unman
On 3 July 2015 at 21:24, cprise <cpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 07/03/2015 08:59 PM, Patrick Schleizer wrote:
Unman:
On Fri, Jul 03, 2015 at 11:04:42PM +0000, Patrick Schleizer wrote:
I am sure now. There is an issue here. I am able to reproduce it.

Start a debian-8 based AppVM. Test command:

notify-send test

It won't go away by clicking it.

Fedora based AppVMs do not have this issue.

Cheers,
Patrick


I noticed this within the last week when testing Whonix 11.  I am thinking it may have been some change in the template with an update within the last week since it never used to happen.

cprise

unread,
Jul 4, 2015, 12:17:16 AM7/4/15
to nrgaway, Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com, Unman
On 07/03/2015 09:55 PM, nrgaway wrote:
> On 3 July 2015 at 21:24, cprise <cpr...@gmail.com
> <mailto:cpr...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> On 07/03/2015 08:59 PM, Patrick Schleizer wrote:
>
> Unman:
>
> On Fri, Jul 03, 2015 at 11:04:42PM +0000, Patrick Schleizer
> wrote:
>
> I am sure now. There is an issue here. I am able to
> reproduce it.
>
> Start a debian-8 based AppVM. Test command:
>
> notify-send test
>
> It won't go away by clicking it.
>
> Fedora based AppVMs do not have this issue.
>
> Cheers,
> Patrick
>
>
> I noticed this within the last week when testing Whonix 11. I am
> thinking it may have been some change in the template with an update
> within the last week since it never used to happen.

It has happened to me ever since I moved to Debian 8 several months ago
for my service vms. And its intermittent; happens about 1 out of 30 popups.

I wonder if this is another dbus-related problem as with nautilus window
not appearing.

Patrick Schleizer

unread,
Jul 21, 2015, 4:13:24 PM7/21/15
to cprise, qubes...@googlegroups.com, nrgaway
cprise:
This workaround also works for me.

Cheers,
Patrick

Patrick Schleizer

unread,
Jul 21, 2015, 4:16:17 PM7/21/15
to Unman, qubes...@googlegroups.com, nrgaway
Unman:
notify-send test ; echo $?

What's the output?

Do you have the libnotify-bin package installed?

Cheers,
Patrick

Patrick Schleizer

unread,
Jul 21, 2015, 4:18:44 PM7/21/15
to qubes...@googlegroups.com, nrgaway
Patrick Schleizer:
Posted on Qubes github issues:
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1076

Cheers,
Patrick

Unman

unread,
Jul 21, 2015, 5:32:52 PM7/21/15
to Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com, nrgaway
Yes I had that package.
So in the last 18 days I've run some updates and now the popup appears.
Clicking on it does nothing.
It disappears automatically after a few seconds. I thought this was due
to my using a term from the same VM but this is not so: even if I work
in another VM the popup disappears.

u

nrgaway

unread,
Jul 21, 2015, 8:35:28 PM7/21/15
to Unman, Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com
Anyone using the latest qubes-gui-vm v3.0.8 in the testing repo?  It fixed some QT issues but also seems to have fixed this issue for me as well.

Marek Marczykowski-Górecki

unread,
Jul 21, 2015, 9:13:29 PM7/21/15
to nrgaway, Unman, Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
This is rather unlikely...

The whole story:
notify-send uses standard dbus API to call notification service,
whatever it is on given system. On Fedora VMs we have by default
mate-notification-daemon, on Debian - notify-osd. Those two services
differ in behaviour:
- mate-notification-daemon shows notification, which can be closed by
clicking on it, or after timeout
- notify-osd shows notification which is closed only after some
inactivity timeout (*), where "inactivity" is defined as "mouse pointer
away from the notification"

Given that VM receives mouse events only when the pointer is above
window belonging to that VM, sometimes it could be hard to get the
pointer away from the notification. Especially when there is no other
windows active - when you position mouse at such notification, the
pointer will stay there, even when you move mouse to another screen
corner - such move will be outside of VM window, so VM will not receive it.

I think the solution for this particular problem would be to simply
change default notification daemon. Any propositions which one? The same
as in Fedora?

There is also more general problem that the VM can create a window that
is immune to window manager actions, but this is separate issue
orthogonal to this one. Lets focus on notify-osd problem in this thread.

(*) According to https://launchpad.net/notify-osd this is a feature -
popups will not block clicks in the region - underlying application will
receive it.

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJVru4wAAoJENuP0xzK19csE6wH/A6dpgK1F64q0owSbnYDDTIZ
G6i4CSQ/8/+3Sf1sg4qgLsWefmiOHPshqoKa333WMRq99oRyoy2ZiSh0+9JBNpAl
bt5wTcwGpLzGbE4Ckd/7ubYSqFhQI0ggP9pU4JlVLV9TvIA2B2Ki5yGFY8GyzLjH
r3xy9AGQZfOEr98OU1HUYKFte9HpXbrtd4I3pxTPZZc+cW/SqkFtKWEB4sm+o3on
ssG3SMCPf7uekjrjmdTZAZAse3PUZDNWktAqDBRNd/KnkfrYIoAwOLUQWzJxwGKi
GMnNFbj9biwjfsT1vJ/cdTnh7Q+muBFfHVxtHe/ERbdZT5WuUrGccpMdeNPqOIQ=
=pIEq
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Unman

unread,
Jul 22, 2015, 10:24:49 PM7/22/15
to Marek Marczykowski-G??recki, nrgaway, Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com
Thanks for the detail Marek - it isnt clear to me now that there IS a
problem that needs fixing, since the notifications do close without user
intervention. (at least they do for me.)

cprise

unread,
Jul 23, 2015, 5:15:00 AM7/23/15
to Unman, Marek Marczykowski-G??recki, nrgaway, Patrick Schleizer, qubes...@googlegroups.com
If you keep any app windows (such as terminal or nautilus) open for the
relevant VMs then the bug won't be triggered.

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages