Getting bored under Linux? How's that even possible? You can do almost anything under Linux. But if you need to have some fun, try these things!
In this tip, I'll show you: cowsay, cowthink, star wars using Telnet, the fun man pages, cmatrix, bb, aafire, pacman4console.

Note: This tip is intended to be for ubuntu users, this would certainly work on other distributions, but you might need to change some commands depending on your Linux distribution.

Make an ASCII cow talk or think:

This needs to install the following package: cowsay

sudo apt-get install cowsay

then type something like:

cowsay 'Hi I am a weird cow!'

Here's the result:

cowsay 'Hi I am a weird cow!'
 ______________________
< Hi I am a weird cow! >
 ----------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

And you can use many other options to make the cow look different. Here's a few examples:

cowsay -d 'I am tired of eating grass...'
 _______________________________
< I am tired of eating grass... >
 -------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (xx)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
             U  ||----w |
                ||     ||

or you can also make other animals/shape using the -f option, for example:

cowsay -f sheep 'Uh oh'
 _______
< Uh oh >
 -------
  \
   \
       __
      UooU\.'@@@@@@`.
      \__/(@@@@@@@@@@)
           (@@@@@@@@)
           `YY~~~~YY'
            ||    ||

To get a list of values for the -f option, just type:

cowsay -l

Note that you can also use cowthink, like that:

cowthink '...interesting'

Watch Star Wars using Telnet:

Open Terminal and type:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Enjoy the movie!

Watch the matrix (yet another Matrix screen-saver like program):

1. Open Terminal
2. Install cmatrix using this command:

   sudo apt-get install cmatrix

3. Just type:

   cmatrix

4. Use ctrl+c to quit, and type this for more help on this program:

   cmatrix --help

[ad]

Read some funny man pages:

Take a look at those man pages:
http://linux.about.com/library/bl/bl_man_asrindex.htm
http://linux.about.com/od/funnymanpages/a/a_man_funindex.htm

I think most of them are just made up.

Enjoy a little ASCII wood fire or fireplace:

You have to install the package libaa-bin.
In a terminal, type this:

sudo apt-get install libaa-bin
aafire

High quality ASCII animation:

Just install the bb package, typing this:

sudo apt-get install bb

then just type

bb

Read some of the funny errors you can get under Unix:

http://www.fsckin.com/2007/09/24/189-humorous-unix-errors/

Some other stuff to try:

ncmatrix - Like cmatrix but using the network activity

© 2008 - 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.