How To Enable Ubuntu AppIndicator For RadioTray

I was reading on forums / comments that a lot of people miss RadioTray in Ubuntu 11.04. You can enable the Systray and get RadioTray to work, but if it's just about RadioTray, you don't need to enable the Systray because RadioTray comes with an AppIndicator (it's not enabled by default).

So here's how to enable the RadioTray AppIndicator (this works for both Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04).



Update: you can skip the manual steps below by using a PPA that comes with a patched RadioTray that enables the AppIndicator by default (thanks to eugenesan for the patched RadioTray PPA!). Please note that the PPA comes with quite a few packages and it will update other applications too so use it at your own risk!

Add the PPA and install RadioTray:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eugenesan/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install radiotray

If you want to use the original RadioTray .deb from Sourceforge, here are the manual steps of enabling the AppIndicator for RadioTray (these were the initial instructions in this post before the update above):

1. Download the latest RadioTray (0.6.3) from  HERE and install it.

2. Important: run RadioTray - you must run RadioTray at least once so it creates the config files. Then close RadioTray (since you can't close it without a notification area in Ubuntu 11.04, simply open a terminal and type: "killall radiotray").

3. Now, to enable the AppIndicator for RadioTray, open ~/.local/share/radiotray/config.xml and modify the "<option name="enable_application_indicator_support" value="false">" value from "false" to "true", save the file and start RadioTray.

If you prefer to do this using a single command, just run this in a terminal to enable the RadioTray AppIndicator:

sed -i 's/\"enable_application_indicator_support\" value=\"false\"/\"enable_application_indicator_support\" value=\"true\"/' ~/.local/share/radiotray/config.xml

RadioTray 0.6.3 Released With Ubuntu AppIndicator Support, Sleep Timer

RadioTray is a minimalistic radio player stat runs in the notification area (system tray).

Finally a new version of RadioTray was released which adds support for Ubuntu appindicator, a new command line parameter "--resume" to play the last radio station before RadioTray was shutdown and a new sleep timer so you can go to sleep while listening using RadioTray. These features were actually included in the 0.6.2 version which was released yesterday but a bug prevented it from running so version 0.6.3 was released to fix that.

Install RadioTray 0.6.3 in Ubuntu

1. Download RadioTray Ubuntu .deb from Sourceforge and install it normally. If you encounter any issues, read on. If not, enjoy RadioTray!

Possible issues:

a) If you use the Faenza Icon theme installed from a PPA, the RadioTray installation will return an error and it will fail to install. Fix it using the following command:

sudo dpkg -i --force-all /var/cache/apt/archives/radiotray_0.6.3_all.deb #or replace with the path to where you've downloaded radiotray

b) If you've installed 0.6.2 and it failed to start for you, to be able to use 0.6.3 you'll have to run the following command (warning: it will remove all the configuration files):

rm -r ~/.local/share/radiotray

Enable AppIndicator

By default, Radiotray still uses the notification area in Ubuntu - that's because using the appindicator, there’s no tooltips and no mouse-scroll to control volume. But if you want to enable the appindicator for RadioTray, firstly run RadioTray (you need to to this so that the configuration file is created), then close it (if you're in Unity and can't close it properly, just run "killall radiotray" in a terminal), then run the following command in a terminal:

gedit ~/.local/share/radiotray/config.xml

And change the value for "option name="enable_application_indicator_support"" from "false" to "true".