How libnotify works?

Question

I'm confused with GNOME libnotify. As I understand, it is possible in GNOME to display a balloon window with an arbitrary text, like:

% notify-send "Hi there!"

But I'm using Fvwm2, not GNOME and a libnotify library is just installed as it's required by some package.

Also I've noticed that libnotify somehow uses dbus:

% ps -ax | grep dbus # returns nothing
% notify-send wow # nothing appears on the screen
% ps -axw | grep dbus
23964  ??  Is     0:00.01 /usr/local/bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
23963  pa- I      0:00.00 dbus-launch --autolaunch 40a5c5864adc0959b644a6e7496569dd --binary-syntax --close-stderr

Nevertheless, such discovery doesn't help me to understand how one can with libnotify but without GNOME display a popup window.

Answer 1

Libnotify is just the notification daemon - lots of programs use it, but you need a client to display the notification.

Yes, dbus is the protocol that handles the communication, but unless you're running into a permission problem, or send notificiation to another user or across the network, chasing dbus may be a waste of time.

The actual client on freebsd is (i think) notification-daemon.