@Dry Falls Thinking about this and suddenly and idea 
A member (who quit the forum) wrote C program examples that put things onto a system tray and panels. It's only examples but I did take and modify the code to toggle X10 devices on and off and indicate the state. I use it on the very latest KLV-Airedale's and it works on F96-CE_4 to put the icon on the XFCE4 and JWM tray.
Let me dig out the examples.....they need to be compiled and is in C coding. Track down the topic and posts describing it.
Found one example I modified but it is close to the demo, slightly altered to toggle an X10 module via a USB transceiver: