[wellylug] Soup Hub Timer

[John Billings]

Hi All,

Ever since the Compassion Centre had some renovations done and we got
some new computers, it's been quite busy at the Soup Hub.  We are
looking for ways to do better crowd control, when people come in we say
they can have 30 minutes on the computer and if someone else wants to
get on after that you have to get off.   This is kind of annoying for
hub supervisors now to tap people on the shoulder to tell them time is up.

So one idea we have is to try setting up a session timer.  We use the
default Ubuntu guest session, which actually seems to create a new user
in /tmp for each session.  There are some ways of customizing this user:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CustomizeGuestSession

Now I've looked at:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man8/timeoutd.8.html

Which I'm not sure will work on not yet, and also tried just popping up
and alert w/ something like:

echo 'notify-send "Time to logout"' | at now +30 minutes

But it's not very noticeable, need something that would grab the screen
and you have to confirm before going on.  Would be nice if popped up a
warning to say please save for your files, time to close your session
etc...

Another idea is maybe use something like Workrave?

Anyone have ideas about how to do this?

I'm going over this Saturday to work on it let me know if anyone
interested in helping out.

Cheers,
John