[rsyslog] desktop notifications from syslog

[Rainer Gerhards]

Hi Tom,

(my training folks are in a traffic jam, so some more time... ;))

this sounds very reasonable, but as I have not yet programmed with DBus or
libnotify, I fear I need to push this off to after queue batches are done.
I'd squeezed in between a short 3-hour job, but that's getting more. Hint: if
you can provide me working example C code on how to connect to DBus, and push
a notification to it, I can integrate that into an output plugin, which I'd
leave for you to test ;)

Rainer

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rsyslog-bounces at lists.adiscon.com [mailto:rsyslog-
> bounces at lists.adiscon.com] On Behalf Of Tom Metro
> Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 9:50 AM
> To: rsyslog-users
> Subject: Re: [rsyslog] desktop notifications from syslog
> 
> david at lang.hm wrote:
> > Tom Metro wrote:
> >> Is there a recommended technique for displaying notifications on a GUI
> >> desktop from syslog?
> >
> > unfortunantly this is going to vary significantly based on which desktop
> > and distro you are using.
> 
> I'm OK with that, as long as it can be broken into two pieces, with
> rsyslog providing some generic mechanism to provide access to the
> events, and a separate client that glues rsyslog to the particular GUI.
> 
> It seems that libnotify already covers most of the bases within the
> Linux universe. According to:
> http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/
> 
> it implements a freedesktop.org standard. I know it is well supported by
> GNOME, and Googling shows at least some level of support for it in KDE,
> ROX and XFCE.
> 
> 
> > one of the changes in Ubuntu 9.04 (just released) was a drastic change in
> > the notification daemon and how it works.
> 
> Thanks for the tip. I dug up this:
>
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JauntyJackalope/TechnicalOverview#New%20style%20for%2
0
> notifications%20and%20notification%20preferences
> 
> which links to a video demonstrating the new notifications. What is
> unclear is whether this is just a new GUI layer over the same code, or
> at least something that is still protocol compatible with libnotify.
> 
> A forum posting led me to the notify-osd package:
> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd
> 
> which led me to the design specification:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD
> 
> According to that, the new system is compliant (or at least intended to
> be) with the freedesktop.org standard. The most notable difference is
> that these new "bubble" notifications are shown for a limited duration,
> as chosen by notify-osd, but if the client app. specifies infinite
> duration, it goes into a fall-back mode and shows a traditional alert
> box. In that regards, seems like a step backwards from
> notification-daemon, given that alert boxes are less visually appealing.
> Of course they might jazz up the alert boxes at a later time.
> 
> (In my prototype I've been using an infinite display duration, with the
> rationale that the kinds of messages being shown require user attention
> and should not be missed if the user isn't at the computer when they
occur.)
> 
> The closest example they have in the spec is the kerneloops one:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD#kerneloops
> 
> and their plan is to migrate from using the (old style) notification
> bubble (looks like a system tray bubble, even though I don't think there
> is a corresponding tray icon) to a traditional alert box (again, seems
> like a step backwards, but I guess they're trying to increase
> consistency and reduce visual variety in notifications).
> 
> By using an infinite display duration via libnotify, according to their
> spec, it'll show an alert box, so this new usage will be consistent with
> the kerneloops use case.
> 
> (Their spec addresses the issue of avoiding accidental key presses that
> might dismiss a pop-up notification, and this was given as a rationale
> for bubbles not having any clickable buttons. But I didn't see how they
> addressed this problem for alert boxes.)
> 
> Having the notifications look nice would be good, but obviously the
> important thing is just getting them displayed. The bottom line looks
> like an app. that works with libnotify under Ubuntu 8.10 or earlier will
> continue to work with 9.04.
> 
>   -Tom
> 
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