No tray icons in status bar after installing optimus-manager on hybrid laptop

kamazeuci · March 25, 2021, 8:56pm

Hi. I just managed to make my nvidia K620M dGPU work in a hybrid lenovo W550s laptop, by using optimus-manager, on a lightdm i3WM Endeavour OS installation with Linux 5.10.25-1-lts kernel
After doing that, I found 2 problems:

no backlight control (solved by installing xcalib package and binding its commands to the backlight keys on i3 config)
2)no tray icons (I use some software that has tray icons, like Nextcloud, CopyQ, Network Manager, Flameshot, and, optimus-manager-qt, but none of these icons appear on the status bar after I installed optimus-manager. I do get notifications though.

any ideas?
thanks!

joekamprad · March 25, 2021, 9:31pm

If you are using default EndeavourOS-i3 config:

github.com

endeavouros-team/endeavouros-i3wm-setup/blob/2e68b961ea10de0a5b260520e06525f8300d70ee/.config/i3/config#L383


# bar settings (input comes from i3blocks) #
############################################

# Start i3bar to display a workspace bar 
# (plus the system information i3status finds out, if available)
bar {
		font pango:Noto Sans Regular 10, FontAwesome 10
		status_command i3blocks -c ~/.config/i3/i3blocks.conf
	    	position bottom 
#	    	i3bar_command i3bar --transparency
		    tray_output primary
		    tray_padding 0

# When strip_workspace_numbers is set to yes, 
# any workspace that has a name of the form 
# “[n][:][NAME]” will display only the name.
strip_workspace_numbers yes
##strip_workspace_name no

		    colors {
		    separator          $purple

This is the setting for tray-icons on the bar.

And we do use dex:

github.com

endeavouros-team/endeavouros-i3wm-setup/blob/2e68b961ea10de0a5b260520e06525f8300d70ee/.config/i3/config#L297


# autostart applications/services on login: #
#############################################

#get auth work with polkit-gnome
exec --no-startup-id /usr/lib/polkit-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1

# dex execute .desktop files
# keep in mind that it can cause issues 
# when second to i3 a DE is installed or mixed usage of i3 + xfce4 or GNOME
# in this cases better disable dex and use manual starting apps using xdg/autostart
exec --no-startup-id dex -a -s /etc/xdg/autostart/:~/.config/autostart/

# num lock activated
#exec --no-startup-id numlockx on

# start conky: 
#exec_always --no-startup-id conky

# start a script to setup displays
# uncomment the next line, use arandr to setup displays and save the file as monitor:
exec --no-startup-id ~/.screenlayout/monitor.sh

what should take autostarting apps from /etc/xdg/autostart/ and ~/.config/autostart/
If you do not use dex because you have another DE installed aside, you will need to add tray icon command for apps you want to show up there to autostarting with i3 config.

Zircon34 · March 25, 2021, 9:38pm

@joekamprad is it possible that he need to install the tray notification manager (don’t know how it is called) from xfce?

I installed gnome then i3wm and can see tray icons including my nexcloud.

kamazeuci · March 25, 2021, 9:42pm

I do have those two lines in my config/i3/config file
When I boot system with intel integrated graphics, I do get tray icons
When I boot system with nvidia dedicated graphicos, I don’t get any tray icons.

kamazeuci · March 25, 2021, 9:51pm

it worked before installing optimus-manager, so, rather than thinking I need a new package, I suppose it is a configuration thing. But don’t really know.
Anyway, I do have notifications, so I’m not sure a notification manager is what I need? I searched for the package you a re talking about but don’t really know which one it is.

joekamprad · March 25, 2021, 9:53pm

that’s odd …

joekamprad · March 25, 2021, 10:02pm

notifications are done with dunst per default on Eos-I3.
But notification and tray are independent.

joekamprad · March 25, 2021, 10:17pm

it could be that you have no primary display set when using Nvidia?
https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_tray_output
you could use tray_output HDMI2 wher eyou define your display name you can get with xrandr
GPU switch could change NAME of display also.

kamazeuci · March 26, 2021, 1:25am

you got it
my solution was:
xrandr --output <output> --primary
specifically, in mi case:
xrandr --output eDP-1-1 --primary

thanks!