How to get Hangouts Chrome app tray-icon in Unity? (without opening Chrome browser)

Is there anyway I can get the Hangouts Chrome App window in Ubuntu 13.04 if I close the Chrome Browser?

ps -eaf| grep chrome

This gives me that there are few instance of Chrome is running and indicating the "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" option is working fine here.

In Windows 7, System Tray will have a Hangout icon to get the hangout window, without even opening the Chrome Browser.

Is there a way to get this in Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

This isn't a huge issue for me, so to be fair, I haven't tried this fix yet. However it seems like it should work.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:timekiller/unity-systrayfix
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

That should give you the ability to whitelist apps again for the unity notification area. Then just add everything to the whitelist like so:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

You'll probably have to kill or your chrome processes and restart to see the changes.

Found this info at http://www.webupd8.org/2013/05/how-to-get-systray-whitelist-back-in.html

Solution 2:

Telling from this issue on the Chromium tracker, it appears that work is being done to support Unity's appindicators, at least as of a month ago.

So hopefully a real solution to this isn't too far off, but for now the closest thing to a solution using a modified version of Unity that adds the whitelist back, like Stephano suggested.