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I'd like to be able to cause notification to appear on a Pi Desktop.

I've been running a recent Raspbian Jessie on a Pi 3, fully updated. I have libnotify-bin and notification-daemon installed (and rebooted thereafter). I am logged in as pi, and ps shows notification-daemon running.

However

$ notify-send Testing

has no visible effect. A quick search hasn't turned up a relevant logfile to examine, and Googling turns up stale info. What am I missing? What are my next steps?

Update: Steve's suggestion below solved the problem. While poking at it, I also was reminded that setting DISPLAY=:0 is necessary to cause notifications to appear from an ssh session.

Dave W. Smith
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2 Answers2

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This is for posterity:

I did some more digging. The descriptions all said, "... to a notification daemon".

So I did a search like: apt-cache search notification daemon

And got some other packages.

I installed:

sudo apt-get install mate-notification-daemon mate-notification-daemon-common

and the notify-send now works.

MatsK
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Jerry Davis
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If you try to manually start the notification daemon:

/usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon

you will get an error and the daemon will not start. The error message is something like this:

Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.a11y.Bus was not provided by any .service files

To fix this install the at-spi2-core package:

sudo apt install at-spi2-core

confirm the fix by invoking the daemon:

/usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon

and then from a separate terminal window send a test message:

notify-send "Test" "It works!"

Steve Robillard
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