Re: [Usability] A virtual terminal inside GNOME session

["Pedro de Medeiros" <pedrovmm+usability-list gmail com>]

2008/12/16 Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec suse cz>:
> Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
>> Hello, usability team.
>>
>> I believe better integration with traditional Unix Tools is a good
>> path for GNOME in general. A simple way of achieving this would
>> be, I guess, to allow Unix tools that interact through terminals
>> like write, talk and shutdown to interface directly with GNOME.
>>
>> So what about "hiding" a virtual terminal inside GNOME session
>> to listen to users and system requests that are sent directly to
>> terminals?
>>
>> Some mock-ups to make my point, then. The result of a write(1)
>> message sent to another user:
>
> You are thinking about something like gxconsole Yes, it would be nice to
> have such utility in core GNOME desktop, otherwise halt / reboot / dying
> disc messages go to /dev/null.


Actually, gxconsole was not what I had in mind. gxconsole
just dumps the contents of /dev/xconsole to the screen.
But, for some reason, /dev/xconsole itself doesn't record
things like shutdown warnings and write(1) messages.

In my system, when I run 'w' I get a list of tty names, users
and processes. Since gnome-session already manages a tty
by itself (tty7 here), the only thing it needs to do is to display
all messages it receives in the notification area.

I don't know how a terminal emulator does it, but I suppose
it is quite simple. I think I will have a look at gnome-terminal
to see how it prints these messages.


Cheers,
Pedro