Black icon in tray at boot

[phdzor]

When i boot into my Arch Linux icon in tray is black but when i right click - Quit the app and manually start it icon is normal color:

[yktoo]

I can't really come up with any possible explanation except for that it's a bug in Arch Linux or the Ayatana/AppIndicator lib.

[emersonrp]

I'm having the same trouble, except quitting and restarting manually it still comes up black. This is with Manjaro Linux, which is Arch-adjacent, so might indeed be a bug in Arch. Will update if I figure anything out.

[fabrizziosoares]

In my case, I have no icon at all. The indicator looks like an empty space, it responds to my commands, but no icon is shown. I am using Linux Mint 20. It was OK until something updated. I tried to reboot; manually start, but nothing changed. I also started it with -vv option to see if some error show up in verbose mode, but I found nothing. I don't know if it is a bug in Cinamon theme, or if I broke something after installing. Is there any package I should reinstall to see if it fixes the problem?

[yktoo]

@fabrizziosoares Did you try to refresh icon cache as suggested here?

[fabrizziosoares]

Dear @yktoo I didn't try yet. Now I did and I still have the same problem. On important detail is that the icon appears on about box. It does not appear only on the tray.

[densha]

I have the same issue on Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon. I just noticed the issue in a recent update. This is what i see in the notification area:

I tried running the commands in the other thread but still not seeing the icon. Any troubleshooting suggestions?

[fabrizziosoares]

That's precisely the problem I am having. It looks like it happened after some update, but I don't know which one.

[evert-mouw]

I only get the black icon. It would be nice if a preference setting could override it. I'm on an updated Arch Linux with indicator-sound-switcher-2.3.4

(Using sound switch a lot -- thanks for creating and maintaining it!!!)

[gnutix]

Same issue as @fabrizziosoares (no icon at all in the system tray, which seems to be the same as #92 too ?) on Pop!_OS 20.10 (Ubuntu Groovy) with Cinnamon 4.6.7.
Clearing the icon cache didn't help, nor did installing from various sources (snap, PPA+apt, .deb file).

Any ideas ? It's kind of nagging seeing this glitch all day long on a new system.. ;(

[yktoo]

I'm afraid these reports do not bring us any closer to the solution.

What I suspect is happening is that different distros / DEs handle icons a bit differently, which is further diversified by the use of themes.

I would recommend playing around with the icon files by copying them to various locations under /usr/share/icons/. Perhaps the problem is the SVG format so you might also try to fall back to using PNG.

Important: do not forget to refresh the icon cache after copying, otherwise the changes won't be detected by the system:

sudo update-icon-caches /usr/share/icons/*

[yktoo]

Closing until more information is available.

[Frost4142]

There is no icon in the system tray

OS Ubuntu Studio
kernel 5.11.0-41-low latency
XFCE
Sound Switcher Indicator version 2.3.6

Sound Switcher Indicator is installed via the repository
The program is working. There is only an icon in the tray. More precisely, an empty space where the icon should be. I changed the icon themes without result. Maybe we need to put svg somewhere so that the program can see them?

[yktoo]

@Frost4142 try to move icons around as suggested above:

What I suspect is happening is that different distros / DEs handle icons a bit differently, which is further diversified by the use of themes.

I would recommend playing around with the icon files by copying them to various locations under /usr/share/icons/. Perhaps the problem is the SVG format so you might also try to fall back to using PNG.

Important: do not forget to refresh the icon cache after copying, otherwise the changes won't be detected by the system:

sudo update-icon-caches /usr/share/icons/*

[Frost4142]

I have tried all of the above methods with no result. When you start the program manually, the tray icon appears for a second and disappears.

[yktoo]

@Frost4142 cannot reproduce it. Here's a vanilla Xubuntu 21.10 install:

[Frost4142]

https://disk.yandex.ru/d/wjntPcpO6MsQIg

[Frost4142]

https://disk.yandex.ru/d/78dl0BzdYME-YQ

[Frost4142]

https://disk.yandex.ru/d/rQ9RnVrGxdVudQ

[Frost4142]

I solved the problem by installing the old version
indicator-sound-switcher_2.2.2-1_all.deb

[yktoo]

Screenshots are good but I need to reproduce the problem in order to diagnose it. So far I failed to find a combination of OS and DE that would reproduce this behaviour.

[yktoo]

If I compare the latest version to 2.2.2, here are the differences in copied icons:

-    ('share/icons/ubuntu-mono-dark/status/22',  ['icons/ubuntu-mono-dark/indicator-sound-switcher.svg']),
-    ('share/icons/ubuntu-mono-light/status/22', ['icons/ubuntu-mono-light/indicator-sound-switcher.svg']),
-    ('share/icons/hicolor/22x22/status',        ['icons/default/indicator-sound-switcher.svg']),
-    ('share/icons/hicolor/scalable/status',     ['icons/default/indicator-sound-switcher.svg']),
+    ('share/icons/hicolor/scalable/status',     ['icons/indicator-sound-switcher-symbolic.svg']),
+    ('share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps',       ['icons/indicator-sound-switcher.svg']),

This could give you a hint which locations do work for you and which don't.

It's also possible the SVG is displayed but is not rendered properly (e.g. fully transparent), especially because I switched to using symbolic icons. This can be checked by using a different, colourful SVG file.

[Frost4142]

I will experiment more ! I will write how the result will be ! But it also works well with the old version )
https://yadi.sk/d/Mu7uv6DtU2EmOw
https://yadi.sk/d/mIvNUPSJFzTJvw

[Frost4142]

It seems to me that the problem is in the Ubuntu Studio distribution I installed indicator-sound-switcher
in Mint 20.2 there
were no problems

[yktoo]

I still can't reproduce it, using Ubuntu Studio 21.10. The icon appears OK in both KDE and XFCE sessions.

[Frost4142]

xfce+compiz+emerald
maybe because of this ?

[Frost4142]

https://disk.yandex.ru/d/Wa7IfPE9zEfnOQ

[Frost4142]

Won !
Posted a png here
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/symbolic/apps/indicator-sound-switcher.png
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/symbolic/apps/indicator-sound-switcher-symbolic.png

[madhur]

Same issue here on Cinnamon 4.6.7

[mxmilkiib]

Can the app be made to log, in -vv, the path it's getting the icon from? Black on black on Arch here. How is the app detecting a dark theme? I'm using Awesome WM. Can a settings menu radio button override be added? Thanks!

Edit; sorry, I realise now the aur entry for the app is currently two versions behind, I've flagged the entry for orphaning given its maintainer is awol.

[yktoo]

@mxmilkiib That'd be helpful indeed. Unfortunately, the app knows nothing of that, it's entirely handled by the GTK and the AppIndicator library. This is how it looks in practice:

self.ind = AppIndicator.Indicator.new(
    APP_ID,
    'indicator-sound-switcher-symbolic', # This is the icon
    AppIndicator.IndicatorCategory.HARDWARE)

But bumping the app version might help as I tried to address the issue lately.

[mxmilkiib]

This isn't fixed in 2.3.8. Can the issue be reopened please?

[mxmilkiib]

Can you just, like, please add a flag? :)

[yktoo]

Reopened, but I'm not sure what I can do to diagnose that. I still think the icon is searched by the system at a wrong location.

[mxmilkiib]

If I change the icon tray bg colour to red in the AwesomeWM theme configuration, it shows a black i-s-s icon, so the path can't be wrong, no? Using qt5ct configuration editor, if I change the icon theme to a non-dark one and apply, flameshot changes it's icon within a few seconds. Hmm, what's a good fully GTK based app with a theme respecting tray icon to test with?

[yktoo]

Okay, so the icon is found and rendered, but it isn't the right one for the current theme. The SSI is shipped with symbolic icons, so perhaps your WM doesn't support these?

[mxmilkiib]

There's only one SVG for your app, and it's light coloured. This is very confusing. I'm sure it's just the standard old school XEmbed method, and if there was a problem with this with the WM, it would have turned up already. However, my and some others configuration could be incorrect; maybe there is a foreground colour variable that is unset, but I try a lot of apps and I can't recall (with my admittedly bad memory) a situation like this previously, and I couldn't see anything directly appropriate when I went down the path of looking for issues with a similar setup with the same problem, but ran out of time yesterday, will get back around to that again at some point

[mxmilkiib]

Reading above again; how might I make the app fallback to using png for the tray icon?

[yktoo]

@mxmilkiib there's a regular SVG icon (indicator-sound-switcher.svg) and a symbolic one (indicator-sound-switcher-symbolic.svg), the latter is indeed light but that shouldn't matter as symbolic icons are recoloured by the DE to match the current theme (that's the whole point of using symbolic icons).

There's also a whole bunch of PNGs shipped with the SSI, and my best guess would be they have to be at a certain subdirectory under /usr/share/icons/ for the DE to pick them up. I'm afraid I cannot provide any more details as I'm not familiar with Awesome WM.

What's also worth keeping in mind is that the icons can be cached, so the changes in the filesystem won't immediately be picked up unless the cache is flushed.

[mxmilkiib]

Moving indicator-sound-switcher-symbolic.svg to indicator-sound-switcher-symbolic2.svg and trying to run gives this error icon;

[yktoo]

Okay, so the icon is picked up correctly. Which apparently means the SVG is rendered incorrectly by the system. To verify this you can swap it for another well-working SVG.

[mxmilkiib]

I used the qbt icon; the blue one in the tray is qbt itself, the dark circle is indicator-sound-switcher

[yktoo]

Did you also rename it to *-symbolic? Because otherwise it's just bizarre it's rendered this way.

[mxmilkiib]

Yes, the filename in the terminal is that opened image.

[yktoo]

Well it does look like your environment is unable to display symbolic icons properly; this might be caused though by some quirks in SSI's SVG file. I used SVGO to minimise the file, and that is sometimes known to cause issues.

You could try to replace the SSI's SVG with another symbolic icon (and not a regular one like you did), just to see if it's rendered as expected.

You can also try this unoptimised icon.

[mxmilkiib]

Sorry, bit of PEBKAC there! Replaying symbolic with symbolic does make better sense..

I replaced the ISS icon with a symbolic icon rater with a general icon. After reboot, the tray shows a completly blank space (black on black) for ISS.

The graphic in the file is white, and it is shown as such in the dark GTK theme in the app it comes from.

[yktoo]

The graphic in the file is white, and it is shown as such in the dark GTK theme in the app it comes from.

I'm not sure what you meant by that.

If another, valid, symbolic icon doesn't show up properly (that's what you meant with "shows a completly blank space"?) then it most probably means your system lacks proper support for such icons.

[mxmilkiib]

Can indicator-sound-switcher please be made to accommodate systems that can't handle symbolic icons in their tray/notification area?

[yktoo]

I wish I knew how to do that.

But can you confirm a non-symbolic icon is displayed correctly in the SSI?