Envious of slick Mac notifications via Growl, I looked around for similar systems for linux. There doesn't seem to be anything quite as nice, but KDE has a knotify subsystem that is used by KDE apps and easily scriptable. And Galago has libnotify (or is it libgalago?) a gtk-based system for notifications.

I wanted to have an easy way to get notifications when a build or test suite is done running, so I wrote a few simple scripts to use knotify to do so. See Putting KNotify to work for some docs and screenshots of what it looks like. Here's the docs and code:

knotify-send

docs:

Usage:
  knotify-send [TITLE] [BODY] - create a passive knotify popup

Example:
  knotify-send heya! "look at me"

code:

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright Dave Brondsema
# licensed under Apache License 2.0

# inspired by galago-project.org's notify-send

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    echo "Usage:"
    full=$0
    base=${full##*/}
    echo "  $base [TITLE] [BODY] - create a passive knotify popup"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $base heya! \"look at me\""
    exit
fi


dcop knotify default notify eventname "$1" "$2" '' '' 16 0

knotify-done

docs:

Usage:
  knotify-done [COMMAND] [ARGUMENTS...] - runs command with args, and then runs knotify when done

Examples:
  knotify-done svn up
  knotify-done ./configure && make && knotify-done make install
     (only notifies for 'make install')

code:

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright Dave Brondsema
# licensed under Apache License 2.0

# inspired by http://sami.picobot.org/?p=19 and comments

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    echo "Usage:"
    full=$0
    base=${full##*/}
    echo "  $base [COMMAND] [ARGUMENTS...] - runs command with args, and then runs knotify when done"
    echo
    echo "Examples:"
    echo "  $base svn up"
    echo "  $base ./configure && make && $base make install"
    echo "     (only notifies for 'make install')"
    exit
fi


$@
title="Completed with exit code $?"
body=$@
dcop knotify default notify eventname "$title" "$body" '' '' 16 0

Programmer's Day is today, the 256th day of the year. Sorry I couldn't give you guys more advance notice so you could do nice things for me ... but I just found out today.