Running FC16 with gnome. notify-send has the following options: $ notify-send --help Usage: notify-send [OPTION...] <SUMMARY> [BODY] - create a notification Help Options: -?, --help Show help options Application Options: -u, --urgency=LEVEL Specifies the urgency level (low, normal, critical). -t, --expire-time=TIME Specifies the timeout in milliseconds at which to expire the notification. -i, --icon=ICON[,ICON...] Specifies an icon filename or stock icon to display. -c, --category=TYPE[,TYPE...] Specifies the notification category. -h, --hint=TYPE:NAME:VALUE Specifies basic extra data to pass. Valid types are int, double, string and byte. -v, --version Version of the package. The -u (urgency level) option is used to set urgency of the notifications. The notification's are color coded based on the level of urgency you specify - grey for low, blue for normal and red for critical. This is a very useful option, but on fc16+gnome the option does not seem to work, or are overriden by some theme? that has been set by fedora. See http://www.techpulp.com/blog/2010/08/how-to-show-desktop-pop-up-notification-in-linux-using-notify-send-command/ for how the notifications should be. Similarly the -t (expire time) for notifications does not work. Whether i use this option or not, the notifications always appear for the same amount of time.
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Fedora 16 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2013-02-12. Fedora 16 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.
This still happens on FC20.
This is annoying. It has been lingering around for some versions of fedora and does not look like it will be resolved soon. Please work with the libnotify folks to get this working. Its a shame that advertised options are not working.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=829269 is also for the same problem.
A similar bug on ubuntu - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd/+bug/390508
It is still WONTFIX, I'm afraid. notify-send does send these options along, and it is at the discretion of the daemon implementation to do something with them. gnome-shell's implementation does look at urgency when deciding how to handle it (not color-coding, though). And it ignores the application-specified expiration time. Thats deliberate and won't change.
Ok, it looks like this works with mate-notification-daemon though. I hope that behavior wont change.