Gnome/KDE equivalent of "write"?

[calebt3]

I occasionally ssh into the family computers to update them, and I want tell whomever's on to not turn the computer off while I'm doing that. I could send a message via the write command...if they were looking at a cli or if it popped up as a notification in Gnome or KDE. Since it'll be a cold day in hell before they start playing with cli, is there some other command that would accomplish the latter?

[reed9]

You can use zenity to do that.

Here's an example from the Ubuntu forums.

You could also record an audio message and play it back on the server with mplayer.