wall-messages and desktops

Hi,

I just had an incident - or almost had - which reminded me that AFAIK there's no way to receive wall-messages on GNOME (or KDE) unless you happen to have a terminal open. Developers probably always have a terminal or a dozen open at any given time but the casual user might not and thus simply miss a broadcast from root about system going down in 15min (for example) which could be nasty.

Maybe a job for dbus? Hmm.. I see there are some plans for ACPI-dbus daemon: http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~occ/cgi-bin/ideas#acpi_dbus_daemon but that's a very special purpose thing and wont help the wall-case (I'm sure there are other similar cases as well).

Thoughts?

- Panu -