logging out of $SESSION

the software (evanescent) that i’m working on is supposed to log out the user from its current X session. originally i had some yucky looking code that ran a kill on gnome-session, which quickly got replaced with:

os.system('gnome-session-save --logout-dialog')

i’ve decided this was still a little crufty, so i’ve recently replaced this with:

bus = dbus.SessionBus()
remote_object = bus.get_object('org.gnome.SessionManager', '/org/gnome/SessionManager')
# specify the dbus_interface in each call
remote_object.Logout(0, dbus_interface='org.gnome.SessionManager')
# or create an Interface wrapper for the remote object
#iface = dbus.Interface(remote_object, 'org.gnome.SessionManager')
#iface.Logout(0)
# introspection is automatically supported
#print remote_object.Introspect(dbus_interface='org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable')

documentation can be found, although it took a little digging. the only catch is that this is gnome specific, and you need different code for kde, and each other DE. thanks to http://www.purinchu.net/wp/2009/06/12/oh-fun/ for the kde version of the above.

help! please contribute information on making this work on other platforms, and/or how to detect which platform is running. at the moment my ugly solution is:

if os.name == 'nt': return 'windows'
elif os.getenv('KDE_FULL_SESSION') == 'true': return 'kde'
elif os.getenv('GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID') != '': return 'gnome'
else: return ''

hth

ps: i’m unable to indent code in wordpress (i’m sure it’s my fault somehow) so the above code was trimmed to give you the right idea, without being complete. leave a message if you want some source files.

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July 13, 2009
277 words

• technical