Volnoti

Volnoti is a lightweight volume notification daemon for GNU/Linux and other POSIX operating systems. It is based on GTK+ and D-Bus and should work with any sensible window manager. The original aim was to create a volume notification daemon for lightweight window managers like LXDE or XMonad. It is known to work with a wide range of WMs, including GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, XMonad, i3 and many others. The source code is heavily based on the GNOME notification-daemon.

This fork adds some additional options to the original volnoti program.

Distribution packages

• Arch Linux - available in AUR
• Gentoo - ebuild in Bugzilla

Dependencies

You need the following libraries to compile Volnoti yourself. Please install them through the package manager of your distribution, or follow installation instructions on the projects' websites.

• D-Bus
• D-Bus Glib
• GTK+ 2.0
• GDK-Pixbuf 2.0

You can compile it with standard GCC, with make and pkg-config installed, and you will need autoconf and automake if you choose to compile the Git version.

Compilation from Git

Start by downloading the source code from GitHub:

$ git clone git://github.com/davidbrazdil/volnoti.git
$ cd volnoti

Let Autotools create the configuration scripts:

$ ./prepare.sh

Then just follow the basic GNU routine:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

You can have the .tar.gz source archive prepared simply by calling a provided script:

$ ./package.sh

Compilation from source archive

Download the .tar.gz source archive from the GitHub page, and then extract its contents by calling:

$ tar xvzf volnoti-*.tar.gz

Then just follow the basic GNU routine:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

Running the application

Firstly, you need to running the daemon (add it to your startup applications):

$ volnoti

Consult the output of volnoti --help if you want to see debug output ot don't want the application to run as a daemon. You can also change some parameters of the notifications (like their duration time) through the parameters of the daemon.

Once the daemon is running, you can run for example:

$ volnoti-show 25

to show a notification for volume level 25%. To show a notification for muted sound, call:

$ volnoti-show -m

The best way to do this is to create simple script and attach it to the hot-keys on your keyboard. But this depends on your window manager and system configuration.

Theming

Some parameters of the notifications can be changed through the parameters of the daemon. To learn more, run:

$ volnoti --help

All the images are stored in /usr/share/pixmaps/volnoti (depending on the chosen prefix during configuration phase) and it should be easy to replace them with your favourite icons.

New options in this fork

This fork adds additional options to control icons and the ability to hide the progress bar. By default, it will use the volume icons.

For example, to display a notification with no progress bar and a custom icon:

$ volnoti-show -n -m -0 /usr/share/pixmaps/volnoti/media-eject.svg

In general, you would most likely use this along with the -m flag as that does not take a value argument, but different icons can be specified.

To control brightness, with different icons for the varying levels:

$ volnoti-show -1 /usr/share/pixmaps/bright-off.png 
               -2 /usr/share/pixmaps/bright-low.svg 
               -3 /usr/share/pixmaps/bright-med.svg
               -4 /usr/share/pixmaps/bright-high.svg
               <value>

There is also the option to use a single icon for all values:

$ volnoti-show -s /usr/share/pixmaps/volnoti/display-brightness-symbolic.svg <value>

Credits

• Faenza Icon Set (tiheum.deviantart.com)
• Notification-daemon (www.gnome.org)
• Gopt (www.purposeful.co.uk/software/gopt)