Make using the Command line more fun in Ubuntu

Ubuntu has spawned several really great Linux distributions, and one of the best is Linux Mint. It has always had a feature where-by when you open a command prompt, it displays a simple - often silly - message to brighten up your day before you get stuck in. To be fair this has been around for a long time in the Unix world, but is still funny.Ubuntu doesn't have this turned on by default, so I decided to enable it , and it really isn't that hard, if we borrow a great command from Mint guys.

First you need to install the fortune cookie applications and message files:

sudo apt-get install fortune-mod cowsay

You can test this has installed ok by typing the following:

fortune

and you should get a message displayed.

Next you need to create shell scipt that will do all the hard work for you - borrowed from the Mint guys

sudo vim /usr/bin/ubuntu-fortune

Here is what to put into the file

#!/bin/bash

RANGE=4

number=$RANDOM

let "number %= $RANGE"

case $number in

0)

cow="small"

;;

1)

cow="tux"

;;

2)

cow="koala"

;;

3)

cow="moose"

;;

esac

RANGE=2

number=$RANDOM

let "number %= $RANGE"

case $number in

0)

command="/usr/games/cowsay"

;;

1)

command="/usr/games/cowthink"

;;

esac

/usr/games/fortune | $command -f $cow

Now we need to make this file executable by doing this

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ubuntu-fortune

Then last but not least we need to place it into one of the shell script master files so that it gets called every time when you start up a shell script. So edit the following file, and place the command - /usr/bin/ubuntu-fortune - as the last entry in the file.

sudo vim /etc/bash.bashrc

Voila, when you now start a shell terminal , you will have something to laugh at, and you can of course just type the command we created above to get a laugh on got.

Here is an example:

Now there are lots of other fortunes you can install, some of them can be very rude, so be careful, and you can grab these either using apt-get or using the Synaptic package manager.

Have fun.