Question

I am attempting to use pynotify for a small project, but am having a strange problem on my Fedora 13 machine. It appears that when pynotify is run programmatically it crashes when show() is called – however if I type that line myself it runs fine! I have tested it also on my Ubuntu box, where it runs absolutely fine.

My testing code is:

import pynotify

pynotify.init('someName')
n = pynotify.Notification("Summary", "Body")
n.show()

And the results of running this:

$ python -i test.py 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 5, in <module>
    n.show()
glib.GError: Unable to connect to server
>>> n.show()
True
>>> 

So, does anyone have any ideas what may cause this sort of behaviour? Unfortunately the Fedora environment is one that I have little control over, so any solutions requiring root access/etc would not really work. I can try installing pynotify locally, however, if needed. Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Since Owen has not accepted my offer to take this answer, here is the solution that worked for me. Note that I have no idea why this works (other than vague guesses), and that I don’t make any sort of guarantees about whether this is a good solution or not, but maybe if you are ever in as odd a position as I was this will help.

If you execute n.show() twice, it will run successfully the second time. Therefore, in order to avoid setting two notifications on a system where Pynotify does work correctly, I have used the following:

import pynotify

pynotify.init('someName')
n = pynotify.Notification("Summary", "Body")
try:
    n.show()
except:
    n.show()

Note of course that this small example has flaws, least of all the outcome if there is an actual problem with Pynotify that will be thrown on both n.show()s – this is merely a minimum working example.