My system (kubuntu 13.04 with kde 4.11) has developed an odd fault, in that notifications aren't being displayed by the plasma notifications applet. I just get plain rectangular grey boxes at the top and centre of my screen. (I understand that's what plain knotify notifications look like when not piped through plasma.)

Running

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kdialog --passivepopup "Hello, I am a notification"

again just gives me a grey box in the middle of my screen. Running

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notify-send "Hello" "I am a notification"

does nothing at all.

The plasma notifications applet is present and set to display both application notifications and file transfers/jobs.

Any idea what could be wrong, and what I could do to fix it?

if you add a notify widget to the desktop does it work properly?

also you should test as a different user to see if its you or the system

Deselecting the notification widget from the system tray and adding it directly to the panel or the desktop did not help.

However, I managed to sort it out (touch wood). Recently I had installed a lot of development packages to build a package but it did a lot of strange things to my system so I removed them again. Among the packages brought in were the plasma-active-data and plasma-active-mobilecomponents packages, which had convinced the system tray that I had another notification widget even though it displayed it with a big red 'cannot find widget' cross.

It crossed my mind that even though I'd removed these packages, there might be config files left behind causing problems. So I went through and purged the lot of them, and what do you know, it did the trick. Now, I did the whole purge at once so I can't be sure it was the plasma active residue that was causing the problem, but I think it's the most likely culprit.