On Gnome, programs can communicate through DBus. You'll want to check out this article (from 2006, but 8.04 is ancient anyway so it should still be relevant for your needs). I've never tried, but I'm guessing Net::DBus should be a place to start looking.

In reply to Re: A learning project, please help by forgot_other_usrname
in thread A learning project, please help by koindrop

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