GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 557181
Recurring tasks don't trigger, but tests work successfully
Last modified: 2008-10-21 12:13:49 UTC
Please describe the problem: I'm trying to set a task to pop up a notification every hour on the hour. Testing the task, the notification pops up as expected, but fails to actually run on it's own at the appointed time. Steps to reproduce: Ensuring that notify-send is installed (I believe it's not by default on Ubuntu at least), and as a normal user: 1. Create a new recurrent task 2. Set the command to: notify-send "Grandfather Clock" "It has been another hour." 3. Change the time to "Every minute" (for easy testing, every hour will also (fail to) work though) 4. Select "Add" (rest of the defaults are fine) 5. Click "Run Selected Task", a notification should pop up 6. Wait for the task to run on it's own Actual results: The notification never pops up, whether the GNOME Schedule window is left open or not. Expected results: The notification to pop up once an hour. Does this happen every time? This happens (or rather fails to happen) every time. Other information: This is on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. If I should have filed the bug in their tracker, I apologize, but I've not filed all that many bugs and don't yet know best practices. I use their tracker for "core" apps, but this being a non-core app the upstream tracker (this one) seemed more appropriate. As for why you'd want such a notification to run hourly, I found a Windows app called Snarl that does this by default along with other notification type things, and as someone who often loses track of time I found this to be a good way to be more mindful of time passing.
Have you checked that crontab is running: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto - gaute
I didn't see much there about checking to make sure anything in particular is running correctly or not, but after reading that and doing some more tweaking, here's some additional info I can provide. Also, I'm starting to think maybe this should have started off as an Ubuntu bug after all, now that I understand how the pieces fit together here, so sorry about that. dennis@Nayru:~$ crontab -l 0 * * * * notify-send "Grandfather Clock" "The time is now Hourly Chime." #JOB_ID_1 * * * * * /usr/bin/notify-send "Test" "Message" >/dev/null 2>&1 #JOB_ID_2 dennis@Nayru:~$ which notify-send /usr/bin/notify-send dennis@Nayru:~$ ps aux | grep cron root 5686 0.0 0.1 3412 1024 ? Ss 00:46 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron dennis 12090 0.0 0.1 3240 816 pts/0 S+ 01:15 0:00 grep cron dennis@Nayru:~$
it seems that crond is running .. it should say /usr/sbin/crond and not cron. could you check if this is the case? it is probably the same problem as in bug 509233. if you want to run a program that uses X or the desktop you need to specify which X server to connect to, normally :0.0 or :0 Try what's suggested in bug 509233; add 'export DISPLAY=:0.0 &&' before your command. - gaute
Or try whats suggested in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto : add 'env DISPLAY=:0.0' or 'env DISPLAY=:0' before your command. Remember a space char before your command: * * * * * env DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/notify-send "Test" "Message" >/dev/null 2>&1 if you want the error messages from notify-send, uncheck the no output box in gnome schedule and add something like ' > ~/notify-send.log 2>&1' at the end of your command. this will write any output from notify-send to the file notify-send.log in your home dir, it gets overwritten every time the program runs. - gaute
All I did was add the export and sure enough it popped up a minute later all on it's own. Didn't even get as far as checking for crond. A winner is you! Thanks.
No problem. marking as duplicate of bug 509233. - gaute *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 509233 ***