GUI notifications from syslog

[greyhill-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Madison McGaffin)]

> In the absence of any better suggestions, I'll pursue the idea of coding 
> up some Perl glue to use libnotify. I was hoping the libnotify package 
> came with a command line tool, but it apparently doesn't. No big deal. 
> It'll just be a few lines of Perl to create something that reads from a 
> named pipe fed by syslogd.
> 
> I'm just surprised this problem hasn't been solved several times over. 
> It should be a common need. I've seen a similar solution applied to a 
> specific domain. For example, Debian/Ubuntu has the smart-notifier 
> package which is a Python program that displays an alert message on your 
> desktop if there is a SMART disk error (it works with smartd). Why not 
> have a more general solution that displays all critical syslog messages 
> on the desktop, and then just have smartd log a message of the 
> appropriate priority?
> 
>   -Tom

I don't know about pushing messages across a network, but I've whipped
together a few scripts like what you've mentioned with notify-send.  It
sounds a bit like what you're looking for.

e.g.

notify-send "Updating locatedb.  Go get a cup of coffee."