How to: change notification (notify-osd) colors in Karmic

[genaroneto]

I was browsing over Google to find a way to change the colors of notify-osd and found johnl's topic. Since it's a little bit outdated, i myself ported and improved his path to work flawlessly on Karmic's version.

The patch was made to work with version 0.9.24

1. download & install dependencies
install basic development tools:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libnotify-bin

get the required libraries to build notify-osd:

sudo apt-get build-dep notify-osd

Download the source from notify-osd

apt-get source notify-osd

3. download and apply the attached patch file
right click on the attached .patch files. choose to save it in the same directory you fetched the source (in my case, ~/notify-osd-0.9.24). There are two patches attached. One purely adds the feature to change the colors. The other one changes it and also puts the notify on the very top right, just like older jaunty version (thanks Julien Lavergne).

Choose one of these patches and apply it.

cd notify-osd-0.9.24
patch -p1 -i notify-color-hack-karmic.patch.txt

or

cd notify-osd-0.9.24
patch -p1 -i notify-color-position-hack-karmic.patch.txt

There should not be any errors.

4. build a new notify-osd

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b

This will create a deb package of your hacked notify-osd in your home folder. Install it with gdebi or dpkg.

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i notify-osd-0.9.24*.deb

Now you have to create the config file that will determine the colors of the notification bubble.

5. customizing the colors
save the following file as ".notify-osd" in your home directory:

bubble-background-color = DBDBDB
bubble-background-opacity = .65
text-title-color = 000000
text-title-opacity = 1.0
text-body-color = 527499
text-body-opacity = 1.0
text-shadow-opacity = .1
text-shadow-color = 000000

edit the file ~/.notify-osd to edit the colors. Because this is a quick hack, make sure that each line follows the format "key = value" including the spaces around the equals sign. It's lame, I know.

*-color entries change the color of that item. For example, bubble-background-color changes the notification window color. The value for these entries is a html-style color without the leading "#". E.g,

bubble-background-color = c0c0c0

will give you a light gray window.

*-opacity entries change the opacity (transparency) of that item when compiz is enabled. "1.0" means entirely opaque. "0.0" means entirely transparent (invisible). E.g,

bubble-background-opacity = 0.75

Will give you a window that is 75% opaque.

If you make changes to the configuration file you must kill the current running notify-osd process ('killall notify-osd') before you will see the changes. You don't need to restart it as it will restart automatically next time it is needed.



Thanks to johnl for the original Howto

[blazemore]

Thanks for this guide. I have themed a beautiful blue desktop based on Google Chrome and the default colours just didn't fit!

How do you get the position to revert back to Jaunty style?

[genaroneto]

Thanks for this guide. I have themed a beautiful blue desktop based on Google Chrome and the default colours just didn't fit!

How do you get the position to revert back to Jaunty style?

I have used the patch created by Julien Lavergne and merged with this one. It basically gets the bubble with dynamic, not fixed position. His patch can be found at https://launchpad.net/~gilir/+archiv...~gilir1.tar.gz .

[tommypayne]

Nice guide! not only have you managed to complete my custom desktop but its fixed the positioning of the notifications which i must say has been bugging me A LOT!

Cheers man

[monogo]

Thank you very very much for this cool guide. Have been waiting a long time for such a possibility.


Just a question: What could I do to prevent "apt-get upgrade" to switch back to the original version from the sources? Anyone else with this "problem"?


edit: quite simple: forgot that I could lock the version in Synaptic...

[vauge]

Thank you.

[WaCope]

Thanks, great how-to. Does anyone know a way to change how long it stays up? The default seems to stay on screen way too long.

[tylerannosaurus]

I have used the patch created by Julien Lavergne and merged with this one. It basically gets the bubble with dynamic, not fixed position. His patch can be found at https://launchpad.net/~gilir/+archiv...~gilir1.tar.gz .

How do I install this?

I tried extracting it, then doing a cd to the folder then ./configure but get this:

checking for GLIB... configure: error: Package requirements (glib-2.0 >= 2.16.0 gthread-2.0 gconf-2.0 gio-2.0) were not met:

No package 'gconf-2.0' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables GLIB_CFLAGS
and GLIB_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

[brk3]

It's pretty surprising/disappointing there isn't a better and more flexible way to customise these notifications.

I was hoping to theme it more than just changing the color?

[k1piee]

Awesome howto, just one question though.
What do I change in the patch to make it pop up in the bottom-right instead of top-right?