'who' and 'users' failes to report the GUI user

[Paul Crawford]

On Ubuntu 12.04 the utility 'who' fails to report the presence of a user logged in using the Unity or Gnome fallback GUI.

For example, if I log in as "psz" to the 10.04 machine in use by "arz" and I run 'who' in the ssh terminal I get something like this:

$ who
arz tty7 2012-06-13 11:05 (:0)
arz pts/0 2012-07-25 15:34 (:0.0)
arz pts/1 2012-07-25 10:43 (:0.0)
arz pts/2 2012-07-19 17:58 (:0.0)
psz pts/3 2012-07-25 19:20 (pszpc)

Where as if I remotely log in to the 12.04 box with another user logged in, I get this:

$ who
psz pts/1 2012-07-25 19:21 (pszpc)

The same issue also applies to 'top' as it only reports one user logged in (i.e. ignores the GUI user) and 'users' also fails to see the GUI logged in user.

I expect the core utilities to tell me if there is a user USING the computer, otherwise I could be tempted to reboot the machine remotely after making changes, etc, which is going to make the logged-in user very unhappy indeed!

System details:

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Release: 12.04

$ apt-cache policy coreutils
coreutils:
  Installed: 8.13-3ubuntu3
  Candidate: 8.13-3ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 8.13-3ubuntu3 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Paul Crawford (psc-sat)]

Of course, this bug might really be down to Gnome/Unity failing to declare the user as logged in, but the fault _appears_ to be the core utilities simply not seeing anyone logged in using the main keyboard/mouse/display.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Thank you for opening this bug and helping make Ubuntu better. You are correct on your comment above -- this is *not* an issue for 'who': 'who' only reads u/wtmp, it is not its responsability to populate this file.

This sounds like bug 1027805 (with bug 1027760) or bug 870297. As such, marking as a dup of 1027805