KDE systray behaviour in XFCE-panel and FVWM
Googling for a solution, I have come across many questions and only a few somewhat conclusive answers regarding this subject. Thus, I write this post in english, hoping that someone will be able to benefit from my experience.
I am pretty fond of the FVWM window manager, as it is fairly light weight and immensely flexible and configurable. On my laptop, however, I like having an omnipresent system panel, that keeps track of my battery state, wifi signal strength, email-notifier, and so on. I tried out »FVWM buttons«, but it doesn’t seem to be my thing. XFCE4-panel has so far been the answer, but lately an issue has been bugging me.
I use quite a few KDE applications on a regular basis, and some of them docks nicely in the systray, enabling me to ignore them when I’m not working directly with them. This doesn’t work with the systray in XFCE4-panel, when running in FVWM, though. Instead I get little windows with nothing but the systray icon. Annoying as hell.
Yesterday I came upon a little utility called stalonetray (stand-alone-tray). It is, as the name implies, a small systray that stands by it self, and my KDE applications actually docked in it!
Now, all that was left was to somehow persuade stalonetray to live in my XFCE4-panel instead of on its own. This was done fairly easy with two utils: XfApplet and gnome-swallow-applet. XfApplet enables the XFCE4-panel to hold gnome-applets, and gnome-swallow-applet easily “swallows” an application and puts it on the panel.
This works perfectly. The screenshot above shows my panel, when I’m working with KBluetooth, Kvpnc and Amarok (Hint: the -p-switch makes stalonetray use its parent as background, which makes it blend in pretty smooth).
My laptops is running Debian Testing, and the following debian packages (besides fvwm and xfce4-panel) were used to solve the problem:
xfappletgnome-swallow-appletstalonetray