Bob: > I have an app that wants to create a text window in another session (to > communicate an event to a user). zenity seems like the best tool for > this purpose these days. > > However, even if I open up Xsecurity from the remote session to my app, > using the --display option with zenity doesn't work. No errors, just > fails to perform the specified operation. > > OTOH, if I add DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and WINDOWID from the target > session into zenity's environment it works.
Note that GConf now uses D-Bus, so any GNOME program which uses GConf for loading or saving configuration data needs D-Bus in order to run. You can also run such programs like this: $ dbus-launch --exit-with-session (cmd) So, you should not need to set DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS if you start programs this way. > Is this just a bug in zenity, or have we created a DBUS dependency that > makes this sort of operation impossible for gnome apps? To be honest, I am not really sure whether zenity uses GConf or not. Even if it does not, it would not surprise me if it has some other dependency on D-Bus. D-Bus has creeped pretty far into the GNOME stack at this point. > I find the same problem with gnome-terminal, if I set DISPLAY in its > environment that's insufficient unless I also add the above environment > variables. It also seems to think it's working while it is not. gnome-terminal does use GConf, so that is probably the issue there. > Oddly, xterm works (although it generates warnings similar to > gnome-terminal - zenity generates no warnings at all). xterm does not use GConf. Brian
