Thank you for reporting this bug and helping make Ubuntu better. I am
downgrading this bug temporarily to Incomplete: 'who' (and 'pinky', a
reduced version of 'finger') base their output on the utmp(5) file.
Neither goes anywhere else.

In other words, 'who' is very much restricted to browsing the 'utmp'
file contents. This is a major problem to what you want, since (1) most
X programs do not write events to utmp; (2) the, huh, "event" you are
looking for is something similar to "user is idling", and this event is
not recorded (and, I think, not even defined) on utmp.

An additional point is that, no matter what, 'who' is a core utility: it
does not depend on anything else but the basic *IX system it is running
under; it does not know, or care, if a running programme is graphical or
not, or what it is doing. All it knows about is entries in the utmp
file. So, if a program (like most X) does *not* update utmp, then 'who'
will not know about it.

Although in a different scenario, this has been explained in the
coreutils mailing list at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-
coreutils/2007-07/msg00018.html.

I am searching for similar scenarios meanwhile, since somebody must have
had this type of issue before. So far I have found a BOINC ticket, still
open, on that: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/ticket/463.

Meanwhile, please feel free to propose your changes upstream, at the
coreutils mailing list: simply email [EMAIL PROTECTED]

** Changed in: coreutils (Ubuntu)
       Status: Confirmed => Incomplete

** Changed in: coreutils (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => Low

-- 
who (or w) does not report correctly idle time
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/268780
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