All:

During the course of working on a shared system, we found that it is sometimes useful to know if the roscore is started and which user started it.  I just added a small script to the Byobu ~/.byobu/bin directory that will post a small message at the bottom of the screen to show the status and user.

Byobu is installed by default in Ubuntu, since 9.10, I believe, but the 9.10 release does not include support for custom scripts.  Lucid includes support by default.

To update Byobu (or install) on an older release:
>   sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys F430BBA5
>   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:byobu/ppa
>   sudo apt-get update
>   sudo apt-get install byobu

Once, that is installed, you can copy my script to ~/.byobu/bin/ 

The script is available here: http://pastebin.com/0ntrjmMA

And action shots: http://imgur.com/QVlUn.png

It's nothing special, but kind of helpful.  It could probably be expanded upon by somebody more talented than me.

~mc