# What is it?

Colibri provides an alternative to KDE4 Plasma notifications.

Colibri notifications look lighter and are completely passive: they do not
provide any buttons. You may or may not like this.

Since they are completely passive, they smoothly fade away when you mouse over
them, allowing you to interact with any window behind them.

They also do not stack each others: if multiple notifications happen, they will
be shown one at a time.

Colibri is licensed under the GNU GPLv2 or later.

# Building it

You need kdelibs >= 4.4.

It will build with 4.3, but notifications from KDE applications will not go
through Colibri because kdelibs 4.3 does not use FreeDesktop notifications
(unless you are using Kubuntu Karmic, which backported the FreeDesktop
notifications support).

Build it with:

    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr <path/to/colibri/sources>
    make
    sudo make install

You may need to replace /usr with the path to your KDE installation.

# Enabling Colibri notifications

Enabling Colibri notifications can be a bit tricky:


## First, disable Plasma notifications

- Right-click on the systemtray applet
- Select "System Tray Settings"
- Uncheck the "Application notifications" box


## Second, check the .service file

Make sure the .service file is correctly installed. On most systems it should
be there:

/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service

This file should contains an "Exec=..." line pointing to Colibri binary.


## Third, test it

Run this:

    notify-send Hello

You should get a nice Colibri notification in the top-right corner.

(You may need to install a separate package for notify-send. On Kubuntu, the
package is libnotify-bin)

Here is a nicer one:

    notify-send -i dialog-information 'Hello!' 'This is a Colibri notification'

If for some reason you do not get a Colibri notification, you can configure KDE
to start Colibri at login time, instead of relying on DBus activation (triggered
by the org.freedesktop.Notifications.service file). This can be done via System
Settings:

- Go to the "Advanced" tab
- Open the "Autostart" module
- Click on "Add Program..."
- Enter "/usr/bin/colibri" (or wherever the colibri binary happens to be
  installed)
- Click "OK"


# Configuration

The only configuration for now is the position of the notification. This can be
configured from "System Settings": Colibri installs a configuration module in
the "Desktop" category.


# A bit of history

Passive notifications for Plasma first appeared as "Ayatana notifications", an
alternative notification system I implemented in Kubuntu Karmic as part of my
work for Canonical.

Ayatana notifications were implemented as a patch against the systemtray
applet. Colibri is based on this work, but does not require patching any
applet.

Colibri contains code I wrote for Canonical, but it is not a Canonical product.


# Author

Aurélien Gâteau <agateau@kde.org>
