Notify all users

Colin Guthrie gmane at colin.guthr.ie
Tue Sep 9 08:18:39 PDT 2008


Yan Seiner wrote:
> How do I go about notifying all users?  I am looking for an equivalent 
> of 'wall' for X.  xmessage doesn't really work very well as I'd have to mess 
> with xhost in each user's profile.
> 
> I've looked at libnotify, but it runs into dbus security issues.
> 
> So how does a sysadmin notify all users of an impending system event (like a 
> shutdown)?

I think you are probably on roughly the right lines with libnotify, but 
not the library itself, more the specification.

I guess some sort of event from hal or similar should be exposed to all 
users via dbus and some sort of process (e.g. the notification 
notification daemon that displays messages conforming to the FDO 
notification spec - the kind libnotify generates) will be responsible 
for displaying said message to each user.

I'm not very clued up with dbus to know much about how the system and 
session buses interact etc. but I think this is the right general approach.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
   Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
   Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
   PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
   Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]




More information about the xorg mailing list