Emerge is one technology the University of Waterloo will use to distribute messages in the event of an emergency.
The emerge client program runs on client computers and keeps in contact with central servers. In the event of an emergency, an authorized person submits a message to be displayed on clients screens. In seconds, emerge servers distribute that message to emerge clients and the client systems automatically pop up a web browser to display the message.
A client version is available for Linux. It requires Firefox to be installed on the workstation and in the user’s path.
The latest version of the client can be found at http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~erick/software/emerge/linux/emergecli
To install the program, download it, place it on a convenient location on your system, eg. /usr/local/bin and chmod it 755 so it can be executed.
The next step is a bit trickier, because the instructions depend on which window manager you have installed. The challenge is to instruct your window manager to start emergecli every time you log in.
Using Ubuntu 8.04 with Gnome, I added emergcli by creating a text file called .gnome2/session-manual with the following lines
[Default]
num_clients=1
0,RestartClientHint=3
0,Priority=50
0,RestartCommand=/usr/bin/emergecli
0,Program=/usr/bin/emergecli
Then I logged out and logged back in. Gnome added the program, then deleted the session-manual file so that it would not add the program again.
For tips on other window managers, google auto start application and add the name of your window manager.
Log out then log back in. Then, from a terminal window, run:
ps auxw | grep emergecli
and verify that the program is running. It’s very small and uses almost no CPU time.
Open a web browser and go to http://emerge.uwaterloo.ca You will have to supply some login credentials. Then send a test message to yourself. After pressing send, Firefox should start up and the test message will be displayed.
If that worked, your system is installed correctly and it will display emergency messages as they are released.