Volumeicon no longer in i3 system tray

[watermix]

After doing a big update to my system yesterday, I noticed that volumeicon doesn’t show up in the i3 system tray any more, and my keyboard volume keys no longer do anything noticeable. I’ve confirmed that volumeicon is being started by i3, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything.

I can still hear audio, and in-application volume control still works. pavucontrol still works fine. The issue seems to be isolated to the volumeicon application itself.

Running /usr/bin/volumecontrol directly in the terminal produces no output.

Interestingly, when I tried logging in as a different, defaults-only user, the associated volumeicon process wasn’t killed when I exited the login session; maybe volumeicon is hanging somehow? The last few lines of strace /usr/bin/volumeicon are:

capget({version=_LINUX_CAPABILITY_VERSION_3, pid=0}, {effective=0, permitted=0, inheritable=1<<CAP_WAKE_ALARM}) = 0
futex(0x7ff456c2a818, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 1
futex(0x7ff456c2a7d8, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 1
futex(0x56155bc57200, FUTEX_WAIT_BITSET_PRIVATE, 2, NULL, FUTEX_BITSET_MATCH_ANY

That last line is incomplete, i.e. it looks like the futex call never returned, so maybe it’s hung on a resource? I don’t know enough about GTK applications to know if this is expected.

Any suggestions on how to debug this are appreciated.

[j8a]

Hi @watermix ,

I found a pair of posts that could be a possible cause of the problem, please read it:

‘Volumeicon doesn't loads upto at the startup in I3-gaps. / Applications & Desktop Environments / Arch Linux Forums

‘https://dev.to/harry_tanama_51571ebf90b6/arch-linux-how-to-get-volume-on-screen-display-with-xfce-desktop-environment-4468’

Hope it help, regards

[watermix]

Thank you for your help, @j8a .

Following (i.e. clicking on) the link in your post results in a 404. It seems that the link text in your post and the actual link the browser follows are different; for posterity, I think that the proper link is: Arch Linux - How To Get Volume On Screen Display with XFCE Desktop Environment - DEV Community .

As for the post itself, it’s a nice walk-through to get the volume keys working, but my issue is that I already had a setup that was working before I updated my system. volumeicon was/is launched when i3 starts, and it would capture the up/down volume key events, change the volume accordingly, and send a notification to the notification service. My problem is that volumeicon no longer launches properly.

pacman -Qi volumeicon points to GitHub - Maato/volumeicon: Volume Icon aims to be a lightweight volume control that sits in your systray. as the project’s URL. Unfortunately, GitHub has the following in a banner at the top of that project’s pages:

This repository was archived by the owner on Sep 1, 2024. It is now read-only.

So it looks like volumeicon is no longer being developed, and that some dependency of volumeicon changed under it, breaking it. I’ll contact the Packager that pacman lists to ask what the status of volumeicon is, but it looks like I may have to set something new up – in which case that link you provided will come in handy.

[20210828]

I had a similar problem. I deleted the volumeicon and installed volctl. Now there are no problems.

[nikgnomic]

Arch Linux / Packages / volumeicon (#2) volumeicon not compatible with recent versions of gdk-pixbuf2

The volumeicon doesn’t seem to be working properly with the recent versions of gdk-pixbuf2.

The upstream is dead, project’s repo is archived, so that likely would never be fixed. The package should just be dropped at this point

[watermix]

I thank everyone who has participated in this thread.

Given the demise of volumeicon I will craft a solution based on the ideas outlined in @j8a ‘s response.