With latest gist master branch, I get a crash of the notification area when starting the panel. Log message: (process:25887): xfce4-panel-wrapper-CRITICAL **: Wrapper systray-8: Failed to open plugin module "/usr/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins/libsystray.so": /usr/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins/libsystray.so: undefined symbol: gdk_visual_get_blue_pixel_details. This is because of this part of the code: /* check if there is an alpha channel in the visual */ gdk_visual_get_red_pixel_details (visual, NULL, NULL, &red_prec); gdk_visual_get_green_pixel_details (visual, NULL, NULL, &green_prec); gdk_visual_get_blue_pixel_details (visual, NULL, NULL, &blue_prec); Those functions are only available in gtk 2.22. I have gtk 2.20 and somehow the compilation did not fail which results in the run time crash.