Re: User-level Tasks in Hotplug Scripts?

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

> First question: Is the hotplug script the 
> right place for this? If not, where is?

Sure.  Setup scripts are often used to do such stuff.


> Second question: If the hotplug script is
> the right place, why doesn't the following
> work?
> 
> su - ryan -c "nautilus --display=:0.0 > /home/ryan/nautilus.log 2>&1" &

My guess would be it's an X11 permissions problem,
or maybe a PATH= problem (is nautilus in the path?)
but what'd be most interesting would be the diagnostics
from that "su" command.  That'll say why it fails.

The general issue with firing up GUI applications on
hotplug events is that there's no standard way that
a program running as one user (say, root) can locate
the X server used by another (like "ryan", even assuming
he is logged on only once :), and then get permission to
talk to that server.

As a rule, GUI IPC architectures use some intermediary
process that runs some kind of combined naming/activation
service (maybe based on CORBA) to talk to applications,
rather than allowing users to talk directly to those X servers.
After all, if you can talk directly, you can take over the whole
desktop, snooping for passwords or whatever.

- Dave



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