What handles notifications in a pure Openbox environment?

Question

I'm running Debian and logging in straight to Openbox.

I'm sure that I sometimes receive notifications, which I can actually theme and modify through Xfce's notification settings manager, but what is actually running in the background and displaying these notifications? Is it a part of Xfce?

Solution 1

The popup notifications are indeed provided by the Desktop Environment, and are described in more detail, https://developer.gnome.org/notification-spec/. (org.freedesktop.Notifications.Notify)

When running a pure Openbox session, libnotify messages will go unheard. Once you install a notify daemon, you will be able to see the messages within your Openbox session.

Each of the DE's provide their own daemon, so pick whichever one you prefer. I personally prefer notify-osd, ...had the dependencies, as written using Clutter, looks modern.

Solution 2

The daemon in Xfce for displaying notifications is xfce4-notifyd in debian it is installed with the package of the same name.

The daemon can be started if for example notify-send "TEST" is run (notify-send comes with the libnotify-bin package).

But there could also be some other program making use of the notification-libraries libnotify4.

So to find out which programms can do this run

apt-cache rdepends libnotify4 --installed

This will give you all the packages that depend on libnotify4 and are installed.

Comments

[Admin]

If you have Xfce installed and active, then what do you mean by "pure Openbox environment"? Xfce uses xfce4-notifyd-config for the notifications. But if one runs "pure" Openbox, I would not expect to see it.

[jcora]

I'm planning to install Debian without a desktop environment. However, I have this fear that there are dozens of utilities and daemons that I should be running, that will simply not exist in Openbox. I don't want to end up with a system that is crippled in the background, so I'd like to gather information on what kind of aforementioned daemons I should actually be running... Got any advice maybe?

[J. M. Becker]

Sorry, was year+ late :P, provided the hard info, hopefully it will help searchers.