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In Ubuntu some applications can be set to minimize instead of exit on close. For example, Empathy minimizes to the system tray (mail icon) when the close button is pressed in the application window. How do I make Evolution do this as well?

Essentially I would like to have Evolution hidden in the system tray instead of having to re-launch it every ten minutes to check for new messages (or leave it open and clutter the taskbar).

Oliver Salzburg
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Jephir
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6 Answers6

14

This plugin allows "closing" or minimizing Evolution to the mail indicator (tray) in a native way.

Actually, it simply minimizes Evolution and hides it from the pager to behave as “closed”,
the same as the other programs do. (Empathy, Gwibber, ...) To install it:

  1. Download the last version of the plugin (for example, evolution-tray-0.0.8.tar.gz).
  2. Once downloaded, open it and extract its contents.
  3. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and cd to the plugin's folder.

  4. Install its dependencies by executing:

    sudo apt-get install evolution-dev
sudo apt-get install intltool

  5. Run ./configure

  6. If the above didn't give errors, run  make

  7. Finally, install the plugin by running:

    sudo make install

Enjoy!

rayryeng
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fransua
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8

Evolution-on Modified plugin works fine with the below steps.

I have tried AllTray, evolution-tray , Kdocker , original evolution-on (as per KostadinAtanasov repo on github) and mail-notification-evolution (which is used to send notification while evolution is closed); all of them have a problems with the new versions of evolution with me; most of them haven't been updated many of years ago.

I have found an evolution-on fork that has been updated to match the evolution 3.22 development which it seems remain valid up to my current evolution version 3.28.

Steps to build

Ubuntu version : 18.04
Desktop Environment : Gnome (Default ubuntu)

You may find other packages names and versions on other distributions.

  1. Install development dependencies.

     sudo apt-get install -y libgconf2-dev intltool evolution-dev libecal2.0-dev libebook1.2-dev evolution-plugins autoconf

EDIT start

I have modified the above line to use libecal2.0-dev because this is the default in the newer versions of ubuntu, for older versions of ubuntu you may need to install libecal1.2-dev instead of libecal2.0-dev

EDIT end

  1. Clone

     mkdir evolution_on && cd evolution_on
 git clone https://github.com/acidrain42/evolution-on.git .

  2. Configure and install

     autoreconf -sivf
 ./configure
 make
 sudo make install

  3. You can remove dependencies later.

     sudo apt-get remove -y libgconf2-dev intltool evolution-dev libecal1.2-dev libebook1.2-dev
 sudo apt-get autoremove
Muhammad Yusuf
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5

You can use AllTray or KDocker for this. Evolution doesn't currently have a built-in way to send itself to the tray. AllTray should be available via synaptic.

1

The accepted answer did not work for me. It throws an error on step 6 and I do not know how to fix it. AllTray seems to have stopped development as well.

However, Minimize to Tray did work for me, Ubuntu 19.04 and Evolution 3.32.1. More info can be found on the github page.

Once I added the extension, I also ran the following to have it functional:

sudo apt install xdotool
SaTa
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0

Have a look at this plugin i tested with v3.22 it works

https://github.com/KostadinAtanasov/evolution-on

note : you will may be need to disable mail notification plugin as its features are included

intika
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0

First of all thanks to @Muhammad Yusuf, his solution worked perfectly for me.

Just slight modification. I couldn't install one dependency: libecal1.2-dev instead use libecal2.0-dev.

I am currently using:

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) x86_64 
DE: GNOME 3.38.6

Cheers! :)

Djordje Arsenovic
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