[wellylug] Soup Hub Timer

[John Billings]

Ah I fired up a guest login on a spare workstation at work, and saw that
the initial warning message uses zenity, so I can probably start a job
at login to run a command like:

 zenity --warning --title="Time to logout?" --text="You have been using
the computer for 30 minutes.  Please check if anyone else is waiting to
use a computer"

This pops up a more noticeable message you have to click ok to get rid of.

Cheers,
John

On 12/04/2015 02:35 PM, John Billings wrote:
> Well the notification messages are nearly invisible w/ Gnome 3, but we
> use Unity at the SoupHub maybe they are more noticeable there.  I wish I
> knew how the initial "Temporary Guest Session" dialog works, would like
> a similar box to that.  There is an option to delay that Dialog by
> putting a variable in .profile, so maybe I can figure how to make
> another one of those pop up after 30 ~ 45 minutes.
> 
> Cheers,
> John
> 
> On 12/03/2015 05:18 PM, Brent Wood wrote:
>> Hi John,
>>
>> You already have a notification capability in your echo/at statement, &
>> I figure you don't want to force some off in case no-one is waiting.
>>
>> You could force a logoff instead of sending the message, but I figure a
>> large notification might work?
>>
>> Create an image with some friendly words asking the user to give another
>> person a chance & use your "at" command to display this, so the user
>> needs to kill the display window to keep going,  & anyone else about
>> will see the message - hard to hide, needs a click to move on...
>>
>> MIght be enough??
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:* John Billings <jbillings at catalyst.net.nz>
>> *To:* wellylug at lists.wellylug.org.nz
>> *Sent:* Thursday, December 3, 2015 4:58 PM
>> *Subject:* [wellylug] Soup Hub Timer
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Wellington Linux Users Group Mailing List:
>> wellylug at lists.wellylug.org.nz <mailto:wellylug at lists.wellylug.org.nz>
>> To Leave:  http://lists.wellylug.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/wellylug
>>
>>