If you’ve ever been leaving something to run in a terminal and wanted a way of alerting yourself that it has finished AND you run gnome then I have the perfect solution. Have you noticed the little black notification bubbles that appear at the top right of the screen to tell you about things such as emails and the like? Well you can very easily make your own notifications by installing libnotify-bin. You will now have a program called notify-send.

The most basic command is notify-send “test” “Test” which will give you the following –

This program can also allow you to specify icons for this notification too, for example the command notify-send -i calendar “test” “Test” will give you this –

There are plenty of other options in there but it is a very nifty and useful thing to have installed.