I use 3 tricks to notify me of events:
  - xosd
  - festival
  - notify-send

For Notify-send, I simply do:
<code bash>
notify-send 'Hello world!' 'This is an example notification.' --icon=dialog-information
</code>

For it to work under fvwm/Archlinux I have to add the 2 tweaks from my [[dotfiles:xinitrc]] ( xinitrc.d folder reading and start daemon the xdg way )

Reference:
  * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_notifications
  * http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html
  * http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/89016/notifications-and-notification-daemon-not-working-on-window-manager