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From: Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.programming,comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: linux: desktop notification library?
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Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 18:23:52 +0100
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Robert Heller wrote:

> At Wed, 18 May 2011 13:29:22 +0100 Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Is there any library that handles desktop notification that is
>> independent
>> of any desktop environment?  I've stumbled on libnotify[1] but it appear
>> to be tied to GNOME.
> 
> There isn't one.  One of the *great* things about Linux and UNIX, in
> addition to the fact that users are not tied to one specific desktop
> environment (or to using *any* 'desktop environment' at all).
> 

Yep. I *think* sending libnotify events can be decoupled from the choice of 
desktop - have a vague feeling I have used the same client (bit of perl 
using Gtk2::Notify) to signal notifactions which were handled by both KDE 
and Gnome.

The handling may not be "native" but both seemed to sport applets that would 
handle such messages. The applets are different and look different, but the 
functionality is common.

So notify is probably the best bet. In theory you can always knock up a 
cheap and cheerful X11 based one for the usage case where a heavier desktop 
is undesireable. Even a non gui app that spews them to STDOUT and run it in 
an xterm would be feasible.

libnotify itself is fairly lightwieght:

dpkg -s libnotify1
<snip>
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7), libdbus-glib-1-2 (>= 0.78), libglib2.0-0 (>= 
2.16.0), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.18.0)

So I don't see a serious problem there.

-- 
Tim Watts