Okay, I know it's possible to have a script launch a terminal on the desktop of the person executing it -- but how about another user's desktop? I have a backup script I run nightly and I'd like it to pop up a terminal window to display the log when it's done, but the script is run as root. Is there some way to do this -- have root launch a terminal window on my desktop? (Or, failing that, some similar approach that anyone can think of?)

You probably don't want a terminal command running from your backup host with the display on the backup client. A terminal will have a limited scrollback window, and giving your clients access to your backup host is probably not ideal.

A better solution would be mail the backup log to the user.

If you must create a popup window, consider using something like zenity, which is simply a dialog popup, see this thread: http://mailman.linuxchix.org/piperma...ry/017440.html

I'm sorry, maybe I wasn't clear -- this is just my personal computer, and when I said "two users" I just meant "root" and my own account. The crontab runs as root, so when I tried just using gnome-terminal to execute a command, of course nothing showed up on my desktop, since I never log in as root. When I tried it running a script as myself, it worked fine, but it doesn't work when I'm running the script as root. All the users in question are just me. Anyway, this seems easier to me than sending an email -- if I can just use less or something to display the log file, I can just glance at it and quit as long as everything looks good.

You can run a terminal window as root, and have it appear on your desktop.

You need to be sure your DISPLAY is set correctly in your script. Cron's run environment is limited, so you need to specify such things manually (environment variables, PATH, etc.).

If the logfile is world readable it could be as simple as

tail -f /path/file.log

You're right, when I tried it from "su" it worked okay. But I changed my script, and put the line

$DISPLAY=:0.0

before the line where I launched the gnome-terminal, but it still doesn't appear to have worked.

You may not have authorization to access your regular users display as root.

Run:
In a terminal in your Gnome session. You are sending a cookie for your display to the root user and merging it with root's .Xauthority file.

That was my first hypothesis, but after reading Mr. C's comment I think he was right. I did some experimenting and if I just run "sudo gnome-terminal" from a terminal, it launches a gnome-terminal that belongs to root (I can tell, because root doesn't have the same colors specified as I do), and I can launch another gnome-terminal from there and it pops up too.