Is there a setting for KDE wall messages?

mfoley · 04-12-2017, 10:56 AM

When e.g. a cron job sends a `wall` message, if does flash up on the KDE desktop, for only for a couple of seconds making it difficult to read the message. Is there a setting to control the time the message is displayed? This link https://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/.../msg00265.html mentions

Quote:

Kcontrol / KDE Components / Service Manager. Enable kwrite daemon
(which is for trapping "write" and "wall" output, nothing to do with
the kwrite editor !)

but I've not found anything like this in my KDE (4.14.27).

glorsplitz · 04-12-2017, 12:33 PM

I thought I've seen `wall` messages pop up in Notifications systray, do you have Notifications in your systray?

jmccue · 04-12-2017, 05:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfoley

When e.g. a cron job sends a `wall` message

I do not understand what you mean by 'cron job', I would not expect any message to be sent to KDE from a cron job.

But if you have a background process calling notify-send, you can use '--expire-time=TIME', see:

Code:

notify-send --help

Any message sent to KDE should also remain in Notification Applet in the KDE tray for a bit of time

John

mfoley · 04-13-2017, 01:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmccue

I do not understand what you mean by 'cron job', I would not expect any message to be sent to KDE from a cron job.

Why not? Actually, cron jobs are perfect candidates. In my current case, if a cron scheduled system backup starts, I want to notify the user that a backup is starting.

Quote:

But if you have a background process calling notify-send, you can use '--expire-time=TIME', see:

Code:

notify-send --help

Any message sent to KDE should also remain in Notification Applet in the KDE tray for a bit of time

John

I checked out `notify-send --help`. Pretty terse, no man page. I followed an example I found on the web:

Code:

$ notify-send 'Title of the message' 'Text of the message'

(as root). Nothing showed up on the KDE desktop.

glorsplitz: Yes, the `wall` notification does pop-up on the KDE desktop, but it's very brief, a few seconds. I'd like to make the display duration longer.

bassmadrigal · 04-13-2017, 02:20 AM

Maybe you could switch to something simpler like xmessage. If you don't set a timeout, it waits until you press the "okay" button.

Code:

xmessage "Your message here"

(Although, this isn't a very "pretty" option.)

Slax-Dude · 04-13-2017, 05:16 AM

Like jmccue said, you can use something like this to display a message for 5 seconds (adjust as needed)

Code:

notify-send -t 5000 "message title" "this is the message body you want to display"

Note: this is not system wide, and will display message to the user that runs it.
if you run as root and want other user to get the message, try this

Code:

su -c 'notify-send -t 5000 "message title" "this is the message body you want to display"' username

mfoley · 04-13-2017, 11:59 PM

Both notify-send and xmessage work as you've all advertised. The problem is that they must be run as the user getting the message, as Slax-Dude suggested, and a) I want any/all users to get the message (like `wall`), but more importantly b) the main user on this workstation has no password and I can't do `su` to a user without a password (and spare the comments about not having a password, yes, yes, I know all the reasons):

Code:

# su -c "xmessage 'the message'" maher
No passwd entry for user 'maher'

So, perhaps a different angle on this question ... Since the Notification Applet shows these messages, is there a Notification Applet setting for how long such messages show before disappearing? So far I've not found anything searching for this.

System Settings > Application and System Notifications > Manage Notifications > Event Source: "Local system message services", does `wall`, and there is an option (checked) to 'Show a message in a popup', but I find no popup duration settings. Maybe this is not configurable?