I have just installed LinPopup, but I cannot get it to receive messages. I have found one or two other threads in relation to this problem, but none of them have posited the solution, and many of them are very old. It has no problem sending messages to Windows XP machines on the network, it just cannot recieve them.

I have the following line in my smb.conf:

message command = /usr/bin/linpopup "%f" "%m" %s; rm %s

I have double-checked, and the path is correct. I downloaded the latest version of LinPopup (2.0.3) in the form of an RPM. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Some initial thoughts:

Is the samba daemon running?

Can you run the command from the command-line?

Now switch user to whoever samba is running as; does the command still work?

Does it work if you try a different command (e.g. “touch /tmp/lptestfile”, and see if /tmp/lptestfile gets created).

Do you have the port blocked by a firewall, or the samba user blocked from connecting to your X server?

Hope that's of some help,

— Robert J. Lee

The SMB service is running, if that's what you mean: I can connect to Windows shares on the Linux machine and Linux shares on my Windows machines.

What command?

I've lost you here, I'm afraid. I don't have too much experience with Linux. Can you reccommend a good book?

Again, lost.

The firewall isn't setup on the Linux machine. There's one running on the Windows machine, but it has no problems sending things to RealPopup users on other Windows machines running RealPopup. And, yes, I have set it to send WinPopup compatible messages to the Linux machine.

Thank you very much for your help :-)

Sorry; I rather rushed that reply.

Open up a console. Type What happens?

Now, let's find out who smb is running as. First get the process ID (PID) number with Let's say that was 1234. Now find out who's running 1234: You should see some data, including a username followed by a group name. Let's say the user name is samba. Now become root (You will need to type your root password here) Now become the samba user (or whoever was running smb) And try the command again. (the DISPLAY=:0.0 means “use the first X-Windows display”)

Another seperate test you can do is to change the smb.conf entry to: then restart Samba. Sending a popup message to the Linux machine should now cause the file /tmp/lptestfile to be created (instead of displaying the message). So send a test message and see if it is. This test tells us if the Linux box is actually receiving the WinPopup messages or not.

— Robert J. Lee

Thank you for your reply :-) You are most kind.

LinPopup opens as an ordinary GUI window.

That's funny - when I do that (as root), I just get a blank line. Running it as non-root gives me "command not found".

Hmm, this rather assumes success at the previous step, doesn't it?

I tried that - no lptestfile was created in /tmp.

Again, thank you very much for your help :-)

Okay; that means that you don't have a problem with the LinPopup executable.

The pidof command is a important command, and so it resides in /sbin/; normally users don't need to use commands in /sbin/ so it's often left off the path. As a normal user you can run /sbin/pidof.

The fact that you are getting a blank line means that no process called smb is running. I think I meant smbd (but it could also be started by nmbd; check each of these).


In this case, your system isn't receiving Winpopup messages, or isn't handing them over to smbd/nmdb, or smbd/nmbd isn't processing them. Check that you have the necessary daemons (smbd, nmbd) running.

That's reassuring :-)

Quote:

The pidof command is a important command, and so it resides in /sbin/; normally users don't need to use commands in /sbin/ so it's often left off the path. As a normal user you can run /sbin/pidof.

That makes sense :-)

Quote:

The fact that you are getting a blank line means that no process called smb is running. I think I meant smbd (but it could also be started by nmbd; check each of these).

"pidof smbd" returned: 5662 2498

Quote:

In this case, your system isn't receiving Winpopup messages, or isn't handing them over to smbd/nmdb, or smbd/nmbd isn't processing them. Check that you have the necessary daemons (smbd, nmbd) running.

I should assume that, if I can see shares on Windows machines, they're running, yes? I checked: I can see the shares. "Service SMB status" confirms that SMB and NMB are both running.

Let me try some of your original suggestions, substituting "smbd" for "smb".

It seems that the process is owned by root (both user and group).

But, wait a minute: does this apply if I can get LinPopup to start without doing all of this?

UPDATE: I had installed it via RPMs, so, thinking that this might be the problem, I uninstalled it, and installed it using a source tarball instead. It installed fine, but I have exactly the same problem (and, yes, I did put back the original line in smb.conf and restart the smb service afterwards)...

UPDATE no. 2: I tried installing KPopup, and had exactly the same symptoms: it would send, but not receive. I did change the line in smb.conf to the one suggested in the KPopup documentation, and restart the SMB service after changing it and before testing it. I am at a loss on this issue; can anybody help?

this works for me:

on windows client insert the destination user into WINPOPUP grup:
Options-->Users and Groups--> select WINPOPUP group.
Add destination user to this group.