For a small tool that doesn’t do much, notifyme has a lot of potential. It’s a little tough to show it in action, but I’ll try to narrate the steps.
Starting notifyme doesn’t do much except show a few stats on recent logins for the target account. When the user logs in again though, or opens a terminal emulator under the same name, you get a message in the upper right corner of the screen. That’s what you see on the left.
On logout, you get another message, and that’s what you see on the right. The benefit of this over conventional tools — or more replete utilities like whowatch — is in its stealth approach: Unless there’s a login or logout, there’s no need for notifyme to take up your time.
And it’s also a lot more convenient than trying to keep an eye on an entire different application, waiting for your favorite misbehaver to show up. Of course, once your bad guy is logged in, you will probably want to shift to something like whowatch, for more information.
notifyme is in Debian, but only Squeeze and Sid that I saw. I transplanted the .deb file into Mint without a problem, which says to me it could find its way into any other Debian-based system, within reason. I didn’t see it in Arch.
I will admit on a single-user, quasi-desktop system like I use, notifyme has almost no practical use. After all, I know when I’ve logged in. 😛 On a larger system with more activity though, this strikes me as particularly useful.
