Ubuntu 11.4 Natty – Customizing the Notification Area in Unity

In Ubuntu 11.4 the traditional notification area has been replaced by a new API called libappindicator. Some applications, such as Shutter, are written in Perl and so cannot easily implement support for libappindicator (which currently just has bindings for C, Python, and Mono).

Ubuntu 11.4 Notification Area

There is a way to workaround this though as Unity maintains a default white-list of applications that are permitted in the notification area.

To see the current notification white-list open the Terminal and type the following:

gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist

You should this this command return something like this:

['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'Skype', 'hp-systray']

Select the results and copy it into a text editor – add your application to the list and append it to the gsettings set command as per the example below.

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist
"['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'Skype', 'hp-systray',
'Shutter']"

Then log off and on and you should see your application in the notification area when you open it.

Shutter Icon in the Ubuntu 11.4 Notification Area

Obviously you can use this technique to remove applications from the notification area too. Just don’t go crazy adding every application under the sun or you’ll suffer notification overload (which this was designed to mitigate).

Sources:

OMG! Ubuntu

Shutter adds quicklist support

 

Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid – Edit Button Greyed Out in Shutter

On a recent install of Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid I found that the Edit button was greyed out in Shutter.

The solution was to install libgoo-canvas-perl as follows and restart Shutter:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgoo-canvas-perl

Source:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/shutter/+bug/539527

 

Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid – Installing Shutter, Featurefull Screencapture Tool

Shutter is a feature rich open source application for capturing screenshots. Shutter will let you capture a selection, full desktop, window, menus and even whole webpages. It even has a built in editor for annotating captured screens with freehand lines, highlights, lines, arrows, boxes, elipses, text and more. It is as close to SnagIt as I have seen for an open source project – it even has built in plugins for image manipulation.

Installing Shutter on Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) is very straight-forward. Click Applications, then Accessories and then Terminal.

Next add a PPA (Personal Package Archive) for Shutter to your repositories with the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shutter/ppa

Then update your apt-get sources so that your system knows about the Shutter PPA that we just added:

sudo apt-get update

Finally install Shutter:

sudo apt-get install shutter

Click Applications, Accessories and then Shutter to run the application.

Shutter is a great utility, now go install it!

For further information visit: http://shutter-project.org/