On Thu, February 4, 2010 12:07 pm, Niki Kovacs wrote: > I'm really grateful for all the responses. But could someone please just > simply write down a *working* crontab line for this ? *If* the issue has to do with one user trying to display the message on a desktop owned by another user, that might not be easy. :-) Since the crontab entry I posted earlier works for me, I would concentrate on trying to determine why exactly yours is failing. Which user owns the desktop and which user's crontab is used to run the command? The latter should receive an email from cron when something goes wrong.