11.04 - pidgin tray icon - something went wrong

[whitehat]

Starting from 11.04, pidgin shows a strange icon in a system tray. Earlier I could see my status or incoming message, but now I can't

[AlbertP]

Are you using Ubuntu Natty (with Unity disabled) or Mint 11 ?

[whitehat]

Are you using Ubuntu Natty (with Unity disabled) or Mint 11 ?

mint 11. In Ubuntu pidgin is OK

[AlbertP]

I'm also having this problem in Mint 11 - I don't see a bird as I'm using a different icon theme (mint 11's default) but still the Pidgin icon is always the same. And I like to see there that someone is talking to me.

[karashata]

Same thing here, static application icon, no changes to reflect status or received unread messages... Can't figure out why, thought it might be related to Ubuntu + Unity and the fact Pidgin doesn't appear in the systray by default there, just in the messaging menu. If someone using Ubuntu doesn't have this problem (with or without Unity), I'm probably wrong, and I'm completely stumped then as to what the real cause might be.

[whitehat]

in ubuntu, start pidgin, go to tools-preferences-show system tray icon - always

[karashata]

Thanks, but that doesn't change the fact it's still only showing the static application icon... I've had Pidgin configured that way for *years* (always backing up the user data folder before upgrading/reinstalling my OS) and this is the first version of Mint where it's not shown the usual, changing, status-based icon in the systray. (Previous versions used being Mint 9 and 10, also used in Windows XP, Vista and 7 with exact same data folder from the beginning, so I know it works.)

[AlbertP]

There has been an update to the Mint icons yesterday - and this problem is fixed. Pidgin works fine again on my laptop with Mint 11.

[karashata]

Glad to hear it's working fine for you, I'm still stuck with the static application icon. I dunno what broke it but I miss having Pidgin's tray icon change to reflect its status like it used to...

EDIT: I should probably mention that I'm not using the default Mint icon theme so any possibly fix done to it won't fix the problem for me. I use the Shiki-Colors themes and the gnome-colors icons to match.

EDIT #2: Figured out a workaround: I made a copy of the hicolor icons in Pidgin's pixmaps tray icons folder and renamed it to gnome-colors-common. Problem is that it's using the 32x32 icons instead of the 22x22 icons it should be... Since there's no way I'm making my panel any larger than it is, though, I could probably safely remove the larger icon sets and get the right size icons to show up.

Question I have now, though, is... Why isn't Pidgin defaulting to the hicolor icons properly like it used to..? I could swear the hicolor icons were *the* fallback for anything that doesn't have otherwise themed icons...

EDIT #3: Way I see it, there are two bugs here: 1) Pidgin isn't falling back properly to the hicolor icons when there are no otherwise themed icons, and 2) The thresholds for the various sizes it offers don't seem to work properly (ie. the 32x32 icons shouldn't be used when the panel is only 24 pixels high, the 22x22 icons should...)

I'm curious if anyone knows where these bugs should be submitted, since I'm unsure of whether they're bugs somehow limited to Mint Katya (since Ubuntu didn't seem to have this issue according to one poster, and the same version of Pidgin on Mint Debian also didn't have this issue), or if they could be bugs in Pidgin itself...

[chrisinspace]

I'm using LMDE and I'm having the same problem. I'm using the default LMDE icon set, but all I have is a static Pidgin icon in the notification tray. I just applied all available updates. How do we fix this? I looked into the solution described in edit #2 of the previous post, but that doesn't seem to be my problem. I have the complete notification icon set in all of the available sizes (16x16, 22x22, etc) in the /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/hicolor folder.

UPDATE #1 - It's pulling the tray icon from /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/apps/24 not /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray. I'm not sure how to correct this. I tried copying the icon set I want to use to /usr/share/icons/Mint-X and then running:

Code: Select all

gtk-update-icon-cache --force /usr/share/icons/Mint-X

Followed by:

Code: Select all

killall gnome-panel

But no luck.

[AlbertP]

You just have to delete the icon from the Mint-X/apps/24 folder - if there's nothing there, Pidgin will place its own icon, or use /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray.

[chrisinspace]

I tried that, but only got a red X. I did figure it out, though.

I copied all of the image files from the notification tray theme to both the /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/status/24 and /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/status/22 directories. Then I ran the update command from my previous post and restarted. It's working now!

[ekid]

I am using the Shiki-Wise theme and after deleting all pidgin* image files from the corresponding gnome-colors-common icon folder, the status now works correctly. I am sure that's a wrong solution to the problem, but here's what I did:

Code: Select all

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome-colors-common -name "pidgin*" | tar cvf pidgin-icons-gnome-colors-common.tar -T -
$ sudo find /usr/share/icons/gnome-colors-common -name "pidgin*" -exec rm -f '{}' \;
$ sudo gtk-update-icon-cache --force /usr/share/icons/gnome-colors-common/


Now change the Appearance theme back and forth and pidgin should be working fine (well, the above removes the bird icon, but it's better than it was before...)

[ssokolow]

I had the same problem on Lubuntu and managed to figure out what was going on.

If it's the same problem here, then the issue is that Pidgin has its own names for the status icons and reacts oddly to not finding them. The solution is to symlink icons like panel/22/user-busy-panel.svg to names like status/22/pidgin-tray-busy.svg.

Here's a little script I wrote to fix the problem on a default Lubuntu Oneiric install. (Which is based on the elementary and elementary-mono-dark themes)

https://gist.github.com/1815976

All you need to do to apply it to other themes is edit the two fix_pidgin_icons('/path/to/theme') lines at the bottom.