How can I get the Skype notification back in the system tray?

Question

I am running 11.04. I have Skype running but it does not show up in the notification tray. It was working until I added Skype to auto-start when I log in. Does anyone know how to make it reappear?

Solution 1

You can get skype tray in 11.10 and 12.04 installing package sni-qt:i386

sudo apt-get install sni-qt:i386

OR

You can whitelist systray as well

How do I access and enable more icons to be in the system tray?

OR

If you like how empathy and messaging tray work you can install a third party skype-wrapper package from ppa which enables Skype to indicator-message

You can install it with

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:skype-wrapper/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install skype-wrapper

SOURCE

Solution 2

Install dconf-tools / sudo apt-get install dconf-tools.

Then run the conf editor by typing:

dconf-editor

at the command line.

There under Desktop > Unity > Panel

change the line that says:

['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'hp-systray', 'scp-dbus-service']` 

into this here:

['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'hp-systray', 'scp-dbus-service', 'Skype']

You can change it to ['all'] which allows all tray applications to show there icons in the indicator bar (Ah-Duh!). As usual changes will take effect only after reboot or restarting unity by Alt+F2ing

unity --replace &

Solution 3

Make sure you are not experiencing this bug (Launchpad.net)

Sometimes, the Skype indicator is only one green pixel. It's easy to overlook and assume there is no indicator at all.

If this is the case, just quit and restart Skype and it will come back normally. I have this quite often.

Solution 4

I have figured out the cause and the fix, at least in my case.

The problem was that Skype was loading before the systray application. The solution was to delay Skype on start up. Someone else may have a more programmer worthy fix, but my solution was to change my KDE startup options to "start with a blank session" instead of remembering the last session. I then created a file in ~/.kde/Autostart with the name skype.sh. Here's the text I put in mine:

#!/bin/dash

sleep 15
/usr/bin/skype
exit

Afterwards I did chmod +x ~/.kde/Autostart/skype.sh

It's working great.

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Comments

[mvario]

One other option you might consider is adding Skype to the messaging menu: omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/04/…

[Kishore Chitrapu]

Thanks JE2Tom. I am experience the green pixel in the notification area. But i fail to get a proper icon even after restarting skype. It come up again just as a pixel.

[Mariuz]

sni-qt:i386 installation on 64bit machine solves the skype tray problem in ubuntu 12.04 too (gnome classic with no effects)

[con-f-use]

skype-wrapper is indeed a very nice thing to have. A shame that it's still a bit buggy.

[Andrea Borga]

is there an update for Ubuntu 14.04?