GUI notifications from syslog

[Tom Metro]

Madison McGaffin wrote:
> ...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.
> notify-send "Updating locatedb.  Go get a cup of coffee."

Yes. That's exactly what I was looking for...at least for one piece of 
the puzzle. Ideally, I was looking for a specific solution for 
displaying syslog messages, or "prior art" on techniques for 
implementing that, but this is a step closer. Still needs some glue to 
read from a named pipe, and in the end it may just be easier to code the 
whole thing in Perl using libnotify directly.

But notify-send is still useful for other things, even if I don't use it 
for this project. Here's a blog post from someone using it to display 
incoming phone calls w/caller-ID on their desktop:
http://cweiske.de/tagebuch/DBus%20notify-send%20over%20network.htm

And another where the author used it to notify when a compile job completed:
http://wagiaalla.com/blog/?p=28

(Both show screenshots, if you're curious what these notifications look 
like.)

I'm not sure why they didn't bundle this tiny binary with the libnotify 
package, but on Debian and Ubuntu it's available in the separate 
libnotify-bin package:
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libnotify-bin

I installed it, tested it, and it works. Haven't figured out yet what it 
expects for the icon or category options, or how to specify that the 
notification should remain on screen indefinitely.

The man pages references the notification spec:
http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/
which provides few hints.


> I don't know about pushing messages across a network...

That's not a problem. For my intended application, syslog will take care 
of that part. More generally, you can use ssh to launch notify-send on 
the target system. Not very light weight, but adequate for the 
occasional notification.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/