Since the adoption of Kernel 2.6, Linux has used the udev system to handle devices such as USB connected peripherals. If you want to change the behavior when you plug something into a USB port, this section is for you. As an example, we will use a USB thumb drive but these methods should translate to any device handled by udev. As a goal for this exercise we decided to create a symlink and execute a script when a specific thumb drive was loaded. The operating system we used for this exercise is Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Read the rest of this entry »

[Kristofer] shares a tip on a simple way to add pop-up notifications to Linux scripts. The package libnotify allows you to use the command “notify-send” to pop up a message when you need it. The syntax is simple enough, just place your message in quotes after the command like so:

notify-send "Go read hackaday.com"

There are a lot of other options that go along with this command such as adding an icon and setting how long the message will be displayed. This would be great for projects that interface through scripts, displaying messages as events happen. For Ubuntu, installing this package was as simple as “sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin”.