On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 19:13, Peter Oliver wrote: > Traditionally, Unix users and the system itself have been able to > communicate by writing messages directly to a terminal. Syslog, wall (and > hence shutdown), write, and talk all do this. Unfortunately, this is a > bit iffy under X11 because you may well not have any terminals open, or > you may have a lot of other things going on and not notice the message > until it is too late. > > Perhaps some part of Gnome (the panel, maybe?) should quietly open a tty > to listen for such messages, which could then be passed to the user > somehow. If a dialogue box seems too obtrusive, perhaps an sound could play > and an icon could appear in the notification area. Most messages from X apps are outputted to the terminal X was started from. So a 'startx >.Xlog 2>&1' (when starting X from textmode) should put all the stuff to .Xlog. You can open a terminal with 'tail -f .Xlog' then to show the output in that terminal. In that way it should be possible to output all messages of a terminal to a file, and 'tail -f' it in an xterm. There is a tool called root-tail, that does a 'tail -f' to the root(lower) window of your X screen. Unfortunately, Nautilus draws its desktop on top of this root-screen, leaving the output of root-tail between the background and the desktop. I don't know anything about the technical possibilities, but it should be nice to have a 'root-tail' that works on top of Nautilus, but that doesn't behave like a 'real' window (grabbing mouseclicks and kb-focus and stuff). Maybe a transparent gnome-terminal without borders or menubars that passes every mouseclick to the desktop should be possible (?). I'm no Gnome/GTK programmer (but I have read some gtk-tutorials for C and Perl), so I don't know... Bart
